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THE

COMING CRISIS
OF

WESTERN

SOCIOLOGY

THE

COMING CRISIS

WESTERN

SOCIOLOGY

ALVIN W. GOULDNER

Max Weber Research Professor of Social Theory
Washington University, St. Louis

HEINEMANN
London - New Delhi

Heinemann Educational Books Ltd

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Dedicated with Love to* S'

JANET WALKER G O'UL b N E R

“Here are the priests; and. although they are
my enemies . . . my blood is related to theirs.’ 1

Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra

Social theorists today work within a crumbling social matrix of
paralyzed urban centers and battered campuses. Some may put
cotton in their ears, but their bodies still feel the shock waves. It is
no exaggeration to say that we theorize today within the sound of
guns. The old order has the picks of a hundred rebellions thrust into
its hide.

While I was working on this study, one of the popular songs of
the time was “Come on Baby, Light My Fire.” It is characteristic of
our time that this song, which is an ode to urban conflagration, was
made into a singing commercial by an auto manufacturer in
Detroit, the very city whose burning and looting it celebrated. One
wonders: Is this “repressive tolerance,” or is it, more simply, that
they just do not understand? It is this context of social contradic-
tions and conflicts that is the historical matrix of what I have called
‘The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology.” What I shall be examin-
ing here is the reflection of these conflicts in the idiom of social
theory.

The present study is part of a larger work plan, whose first
product was Enter Plato, and whose objective is to contribute to an
historically informed sociology of social theory. The plan envisages
a series of studies called “The Social Origins of Western Social
Theory,” and I am now at work on two other volumes in it. One of
these is on the relation of the nineteenth century Romantic move-
ment to social theory, and another is a study in which I hope to
connect the various analytic threads, presenting a more systematic
and generalized sociological theory about social theories.

viii Preface

Like others, I owe much to many. I am particularly grateful to
Dennis Wrong for a massive critique, at once sensitive and sensi-
ble, of the entire study. I am also indebted to Robin Blackburn,
Wolf Heydebrand, Robert Merton, and S. Michael Miller for their
trenchant suggestions concerning the chapter “What Happened in
Sociology.” I am deeply indebted to my graduate students at Wash-
ington University, perhaps most especially to Barry Thompson and
Robert Wicke, for their criticism and encouragement of my work,
in and out of our seminars together. My ideas on “methodological
dualism” were developed in the course of working with William
Yancey while I was his dissertation advisor. Admirers of England’s
Raymond Williams will also recognize that I have been much in-
fluenced by his emphasis on the “structure of sentiments.”

I am also grateful to Orville Brim and the Russell Sage Founda-
tion of New York for assistance that helped to make possible ex-
tensive European travel during 1965-1966 and without which this
study would be a much different and, indeed, poorer one. While in
Europe I was fortunate in having the assistance of a multilingual
secretary, Manuela Wingate, and in the United States I had the
great help of Adeline Sneider in preparing the manuscript. My
thanks to both of them for their unflagging good humor, their tech-
nical skill, and their great capacity for work.

As I mentioned, this study is a part of a larger series on which
I have been working and for which I have been preparing for the last
twenty years. I have therefore felt free to draw upon certain of my
previous publications and to use them here where they seemed
appropriate. Conceiving of the present study as a work of synthesis,
I have not felt compelled to inundate its pages with a sea of foot-
notes. If the substance and logic of what I say here does not con-
vince, neither will the conventional rituals of scholarship. I shall
not impose upon the reader’s intelligence by making the usual
perfunctory statement about where the final responsibility for the
defects of this work resides.

ALVIN W. GOULDNER

January 1970
Washington University
St. Louis, Missouri

Contents

PART I

Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

chapter 1 Introduction: Toward a Critique of

Sociology 3

SOCIOLOGY AS POPULAR CULTURE 4

NEW SENTIMENTS, OLD THEORIES 7

SOCIOLOGY AND THE NEW LEFT:

A PARADOX 9

CRITICISM AND THE HISTORICAL

PERSPECTIVE 15

chapter 2 Sociology and Sub-Sociology 20

TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF SOCIOLOGY 25

THE CHARACTER OF SOCIOLOGY 27

BACKGROUND AND DOMAIN ASSUMPTIONS 29

THE IMPORTANCE OF DOMAIN

ASSUMPTIONS: A RESEARCH NOTE 36

SENTIMENTS AND THEORY 37

PERSONAL REALITY AND SOCIAL THEORY 40

THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF SOCIAL

THEORY 46

THEORETICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND

IDEOLOGY

Contents

METHODOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY 49

THE AUTONOMY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE

AS DOMAIN ASSUMPTION 51

THE CONTRADICTION OF AUTONOMY 54

chapter 3 Utilitarian Culture and Sociology 61

THE MIDDLE CLASS AND UTILITARIAN

CULTURE 6l

ANOMIE; THE NORMAL PATHOLOGY OF

UTILITARIANISM 65

THE UNEMPLOYED SELF 73

THE PECUNIARY PARADIGM OF UTILITY 74

THE WELFARE STATE AND THE DISPOSAL

AND CONTROL OF THE USELESS 76

THE PSYCHEDELIC REyOLT AGAINST

UTILITARIANISM 78

THE LIMITS OF THE WELFARE STATE 80

UTILITARIAN CULTURE AND

SOCIAL THEORY 82

chapter 4 What Happened in Sociology: An
Historical Model of Structural
Development 88

PERIOD I: SOCIOLOGICAL POSITIVISM 89

Sociology as a Counterbalance to
Individualistic Utilitarianism
The Extrusion of the Economic from the
Social

Positivist Grand Theory and the
Restoration Stalemate
Detachment and Objectivity
Positivism : Between Restoration and
Revolution

PERIOD II: MARXISM 108

The Social Utilitarianism of Marxism
The Binary Fission of Marxism and
Academic Sociology
Positivism and Subsequent
Functionalism

The Schism between Romantic and
Utilitarian Cultural Syndromes
PERIOD III: CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY Il6

The Decline of Evolutionism and Rise of
Functionalism

Differentiation of the German and French
Responses to Utilitarianism

Contents

Continuities between Positivism rr< i
FTTr r f'f nslic — !

The Problem of Anthropology arid Sociology
in England

Ftmccionalism in Fr-Pch Anthropology

The Extrusion of Religion

Sociology’s Integration into the Uni ver s it y
PERIOD IV: PARSONSIAN STRUCTURAL-
FUN CTIONALISM

Structural-F tract: crralism as a Synthesis cf
French Functionalism and German
Romanticism

The Scciology cf Morals: A Structural
I ■arena in Sociology

Stmctural-F unction aSi sm in the C o n te x t cf

The'ceneral Crisis cf Middle-Class Society
and Parscnsianism

Intemationalizaticn cf Academic Sociology

Positivism and Parsons: From Scientism
to Professionalism

THE BEGINNING OF A XB" PERIOD:
EMERGING TRENDS

Marxism and Academic Sociolosrv:

Schism and Growing Polycentrism

Parsonsiardsm: Imocndina Entrcw

138

J 57

PART II

The I'Porld. of Talcott Parsons

chapter 5 The Early Parsons 167

THE IMPORTANCE Or PARSONS 1 67

UNIVERSITY STRUCTURE AND

THEORETICAL DETACHMENT l6o

PARSON'S AT HARVARD 1 72

THE DEBATE ABOUT CAPITALISM 1 78

TOWARD THE PERFECTION' OF

CAPITALISM 182

'1 HE DRIFT TOWARD THEORETICAL

VOLUNTARISM 1 85

ALIENATION AND VOLUNTARISM iSo

THE UBERAUZATION OF FUNCTIONALISM IQ5

Making the World Whole:

Persons as a Systems Analyst

CHAPTER 6

199

Contents

NOTES TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF
THEORETICAL OBSCURITY
THE CONCEPTUAL SYSTEM AS ICON
PARSONS AS SYSTEM ANALYST
PROBLEMS OF SYSTEM ANALYSIS
SYSTEM INTERDEPENDENCE
FUNCTIONAL AUTONOMY AND
INTERDEPENDENCE
MORAL CODES AS CONDUCTORS OF
TENSION

THE SOCIAL SYSTEM AND THE SELF
ANOMIE AS DE-DIFFERENTIATION
WEIGHTING THE SYSTEM ELEMENTS
EQUILIBRIUM PROBLEMS
DECLINING MARGINAL UTILITY OF
CONFORMITY

CONSTRAINT AND THE PRICE OF
CONFORMITY

SCARCITY AND SUPPLY OF
GRATIFICATIONS

RECIPROCITY, COMPLEMENTARITY, AND
EXPLOITATION

EQUILIBRIUM AND POWER DISPARITIES

chapter 7 The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons:

Religion, Piety, and the Quest for
Order in Functionalism

LATENT IDENTITIES
THE DURKHEIMIAN DILEMMA
FUNCTIONALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF
ORDER

RELIGION AND MORALITY IN
FUNCTIONALISM

FUNCTIONALISM AND RELIGION:

SOME SURVEY DATA
THE PIETY OF FUNCTIONALISM
SOCIAL BASES OF MORAL CONCERN
MORALITY AND IMPUTED
NONPARTISANSHIP

POSITIVISM AND THE MORAL CRISIS OF
INDUSTRIALISM

200

205

210

213

215

217

2l8

224

226

231

232

234

236

239

242

246

248

251

254

258

262

266

273

274

Contents

MORALITY AND SCARCITY UNDER

xiii

INDUSTRIALISM

278

SOME DILEMMAS AND PROSPECTS

282

CHAPTER

8 Parsons on Power and Wealth

286

THE PROBLEMATICS OF POWER

MAKING AMERICAN SOCIETY WHOLE:

290

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING RICH

297

TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF PROPERTY

304

TALCOTT PARSONS ON C. WRIGHT MILLS

ACHIEVEMENT, ASCRIPTION, AND THE

313

FAMILY

320

ANOMIE AND PROPERTY INSTITUTIONS

DIFFERENTIATION OF THE PRESTIGE

323

HIERARCHY AND MORAL CODE

THE NATURE OF FUNCTIONALIST

CONSERVATISM: A SUMMARY AND

326

OVERVIEW

33 i

FUNCTIONALISM AS VALUE UNFREE

333

PART III

The Coming Crisis of PV estem Sociology

chapter 9 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, l:

The Shift toward the Welfare State 341

THE WELFARE STATE AND

FUNCTIONALISM 342

PRESSURE OF THE WELFARE STATE 344

CHANGE THEORY 35 I

ASPECTS OF PARSONS’ CHANGE ANALYSIS 353

THE DRIFT TOWARD MARXISM 354

DIFFERENTIATION: THE FORCES VERSUS

THE RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION 357

THE PARSONS-MARX CONVERGENCE IN

EVOLUTIONISM 362

SMELSER AND MOORE: THE

FUNCTIONALIST CONVERGENCE

WITH MARXISM 368

chapter 10 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, 11:
The Entropy of Functionalism
and the Rise of New Theories

373

xiv

Contents

ENTROPY AND THE SEED GROUP 374

THE DISAFFECTION OF THE YOUNG 376

OTHER SYMPTOMS OF THE CRISIS:

GOFFMAN’S DRAMATURGY 378

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY : SOCIOLOGY AS A

HAPPENING 390

HOMANS: THE TOUGH-MINDED WORLD

OF EXCHANGE 395

THEORY AND ITS INFRASTRUCTURE 396

NEW LEFT AND NEW INFRASTRUCTURE 399

SOCIAL THEORY AND THE UNIVERSITY 402

THEORY, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND NEW

GENERATIONS 404

SOCIOLOGY AND THE NEW LEFT 405

RESUME 410

chapter 11 From Plato to Parsons: The Infrastructure

of Conservative Social Theory 412

THE PARTIALLY GOOD WORLD 414

AMBIVALENCE TOWARD SOCIETY 415

IS EVIL REAL? 417

THE WORLD AS GOOD AND EVIL 418

NO SOCIETY, NO HUMANNESS 419

THE METAPHYSICS OF HIERARCHY 42 1

AN ORDERLY WORLD 422

THE LEGITIMATE AND THE AUTHENTIC 423

DEVIANCE AND ANOMIE 425

THE COSTS OF CONFORMITY 428

INSATIABLE MAN 43O

PESSIMISM: DEATH AND THE

HUMAN CONDITION . 432

THE VIABILITY OF THE FUNCTIONALIST

INFRASTRUCTURE 435

THE POTENTIAL OF A RADICAL SOCIOLOGY 437
A NOTE ON THE FUTURE OF SOCIOLOGY 443

chapter 12 Notes on the Crisis of Marxism and the
Emergence of Academic Sociology in
the Soviet Union 447

THE CRISIS OF SOVIET MARXISM:

THE LINGUISTICS CONTROVERSY 452

FUNCTIONALISM GOES EAST 455

Contents

ACADEMIC SOCIOLOGY IN THE

SOVIET BLOC 459

SOCIAL SOURCES OF ACADEMIC SOCIOLOGY

IN THE SOVIET UNION 463

THE MANDATE OF SOVIET SOCIOLOGY:

SOCIETAL INTEGRATION 465

A MODEL OF THE STRUCTURAL SOURCES
OF THE INSTITUTION ALIZA TION OF
ACADEMIC SOCIOLOGY 467

THE COMING READJUSTMENT IN WORLD

SOCIOLOGY 473

INSTITUTES AND UNIVERSITY CONTEXTS

FOR SOCIOLOGY 476

PART IV

Epilogue: The Theorist Pulls Himself Together 3
Partially

chapter 13 Living as a Sociologist:

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 481

SOCIAL THEORY AND PERSONAL REALITY
IN “THE COMING CRISIS OF WESTERN
SOCIOLOGY” 482

SOCIAL WORLDS, PERMITTED AND

UNPERMITTED 484

TOWARD A REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY 488

SOCIOLOGY AND THE LIBERAL

TECHNOLOGUES 500

REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY AND RADICAL

SOCIOLOGY 503

REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY AS A WORK ETHIC 504

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY: A SLIPPAGE 507

REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY LOOKS AT ITSELF 510

Index

513

PART I

Sociology: Contradictions
and Infrastructure

CHAPTER

Introduction: Toward a Critique of

Sociology

The criticism and transformation of society can be divorced only
at our peril from the criticism and transformation of theories about
society. Yet the gap between theory and practice, so common in the
history of American radical movements, is in some quarters grow-
ing wider. Some of the most militant of American radicals, in the
New Left or in the movement for Black liberation, have at least
temporarily avoided any serious concern with social theory.

This neglect of theory doubtless has various origins. In some
part it is due to the fact that these social movements are still new
and their political activism consumes their necessarily limited en-
ergies and resources; the new radicalisms will, in short, need time
to produce their new theories. Although the neglect of theory is
scarcely peculiar to Americans, it is in part also due to the fact that
American radicals are often more American than they know and
may prefer the tangible outcomes of pragmatic politics to the in-
tangible outputs of theory. Again, part of their neglect of theoretical
problems is probably due to the close links that some young radicals
have with the “hippie” contingent of their generation, whose more
expressive and aesthetic styles of rejecting American culture dis-
pose them to avoid what they take to be the sterile “hassles” of
intellectual confrontation. There is also a vocal minority who, as
has been said, feel personally excluded when they hear an appeal to
reason.

Sociolog}*: Contradictions and Infrastructure

SOCIOLOGY AS POPULAR CULTURE

There are, however, other important sources of theoretical apathy
among young American radicals today, and these, among other
things, distinguish them from the radicals of the ig3o’s. One of
these may well be the emergence of sociolog}', between the 1940’s
and the 1960's, as part of popular culture. Sociology then came of
age, institutionally if not intellectually. It became a viable part of
the academic scene: hundreds of thousands of American college
students took courses in sociology; literally thousands of sociology
books were written. At the same time, the newly emerging paper-
back book industry made these available as mass literature. They
were sold in drugstores, railway stations, air terminals, hotels, and
grocery stores, while, at the same time, increasing middle-class
affluence made it easier for students to purchase them, even when
not required as textbooks.

This mass availability of sociology (and the other social sci-
ences ) as part of everyday culture has had a paradoxical effect on
the attitudes that some young people developed toward social
theory and social problems. On the one side, the bookstore mingling
of social science with other expressions of popular literature identi-
fied social science, by association, as part and parcel of the larger
culture that the radicals rejected. Some young radicals thus came
to distrust social theory because they experienced it as part of the
prevailing culture. On the other side, however, sheer familiarity
with the social sciences led some to accept it uncritically. For some
young people the paperback sociology of the bookstore began to
take the place of the earlier literature of radical criticism and
protest.

Assimilating the social sciences as part of everyday culture, read-
ing books about the nature of prejudice or poverty, the facts of life
in America often seemed quite clear to them. Efforts to discuss
theory might then seem to be an unnecessary obfuscation, a sub-
stitution of talking about problems for doing something about them.
Viewing these researches against the background of their own
values, they often experienced a simple moral revulsion rather
than an intellectual stimulation. Theorizing, some came to believe,
was a form of escapism, if not of moral cowardice.

Yet the neglect of self-conscious theory by radicals is both dan-
gerous and ironic, for such a posture implies that — although they
lay claim to being radical — they have in effect surrendered to one
of the most vulgar currents of American culture: to its small-town,

Introduction: Toward a Critique of Sociology 5

Babbitt-like anti-intellectualism and know-nothingism. Moreover, if
radicals wish to change their world, they must surely expect to do
so only against the resistance of some and with the help of others.
Yet those whom they oppose, as well as those with whom they may
wish to ally themselves, will in fact often be guided by certain
theories. Without self-conscious theory, radicals will be unable to
understand, let alone change, either their enemies or their friends.
Radicals who believe that they can separate the task of developing
theory from that of changing society are not in fact acting without
a theory, but with one that is tacit and therefore unexaminable
and uncorrectable. If they do not learn to use their theory self-
consciously, they will be used by it. Unable either to control or to
understand their theories, radicals will thus in effect submit to one
form of the very alienation that they commonly reject.

The profound transformation of society that many radicals seek
cannot be accomplished by political means alone; it cannot be
confined to a purely political embodiment. For the old society is
not held together merely by force and violence, or expedience and
prudence. The old society maintains itself also through theories
and ideologies that establish its hegemony over the minds of men,
who therefore do not merely bite their tongues but submit to it
willingly. It will be impossible either to emancipate men from the
old society or to build a humane new one, without beginning, here
and now, the construction of a total counter-culture, including new
social theories; and it is impossible to do this without a critique of
the social theories dominant today.

The ambivalence toward theory among some sectors of the New
Left, the simultaneous sense of its irrelevance and of its necessity,
was clearly expressed by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leading
activists in the French student rebellion that began at Nanterre
in the spring of 1968: the anarchists, he remarked, “have influ-
enced me more by certain activities than by their theories . . .
theoreticians are laughable.” At the same time, however, Cohn-
Bendit also observed "the existence of a gap between theory and
practice ... we are trying to effectively develop a theory.” 1

That theory has had an effect upon the emerging New Left,
whatever the attitude toward it, is evidenced, among other things,
by the role of the “Frankfurt school of critical sociology” — including
Jurgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer — which
has been said to be “as important as any single event” 2 in the
political revitalization of the Sozialisticher Deutscher Studentbund
from 1961-1965. Also, there is the international responsiveness of
the new radicals to the work of another member of that school,
Herbert Marcuse, whose practical importance was backhandedly
acknowledged by recent Soviet critiques of his theory. Yet even

6 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

here, within the critical school of sociology, the continuing tension
between theory and practice was evidenced by the polemical ex-
change between Habermas and the young militants during the fall
of 1968, after their demonstrations at Frankfurt.

Lacking the time or the impulse to reformulate old theories or
to develop their own new. theories, the radicals’ need of a theory
is today sometimes satisfied by a hastily gulped, vulgar Marxism.
Yet even this seems better than another alternative often taken
today, namely, merely to label one’s own views as “Marxist.” This
self-characterization may express solidarity with a powerful intel-
lectual tradition but, lacking any true assimilation of it, provides
no real help. Indeed, this “magic naming” may do harm, since it
can distract critical attention from the rather different theory that
the individual may, in point of fact, actually be using. Thus, on one
occasion I heard a young radical deliver an extended critique of
modem sociology, particularly of Talcott Parsons’ version of Func-
tionalism, from what he claimed to be a Marxist standpoint, when
he was actually viewing it only from the standpoint of another,
somewhat different version of Functional theory.

At its best, such uses of Marxism by American radicals, even
when they are more than merely invocatory, are fundamentally
regressive and primitivistic. This is particularly true in the United
States, where, apart from a very few economists and a slightly
larger number of capable historians, Marxism itself has developed
hardly at all; where its intellectual caliber remains fixated on the
stunted level of the 1930’s, when it was blighted by Stalinism; and
where it has hardly begun to assimilate even the older contributions
of a Georg Lukacs or an Antonio Gramsei, let alone those of the
brilliant German, Italian, and French contemporaries. American
Marxists have been among the less original and creative contin-
gents of world Marxism; they have usually only applied, but prac-
tically never deepened, Marxist theory. Unless one is willing to
believe that the academic social sciences have contributed nothing
of value to an understanding of modem society during the last
thirty years, the flight back to an unreconstructed Marxism is an
act, at best, of desperation, and at worst, of irresponsibility or bad
faith. Many young radicals today, however, have no impulse to
retreat to a rote Marxism. Indeed, many are deeply critical of what
they take to be its ingrained disposition toward a totalitarian
Realpolitik; for some, this becomes still one further reason to
suspect and avoid theory.

Introduction: Toward a Critique of Sociology

NEW SENTIMENTS, OLD THEORIES

My reading of the contemporary radical condition is that we are
now living in a fluid transitional era when a younger generation
has emerged with a sharply different structure of sentiments, with
collective feelings that are not resonated by the very different kinds
of sentiments that have been historically deposited in older theories,
and this makes some among the younger generation either coldly
indifferent or hody antagonistic to the older theories. There is, in
short, a gap between the newly emerging structure of sentiments
among young radicals and the older “languages” or theories, a gap
that has not yet been bridged by the development of a new theo-
retical language in which young radicals might more fully express
themselves and their own conception of reality.

From this standpoint, the crux of the issue is the lack of “fit”
between new sentiments and old theories. It is precisely because
of this that certain young radicals do not simply feel the old
theories are “wrong” and should be criticized in detail; their more
characteristic response to the older theories is a feeling of their
sheer irrelevance. Their inclination is not to disprove or argue with
the old theories, but to ridicule or avoid them.

At this juncture, academic social theorists might reply that in
this respect the New Left is simply being wrong-headed, for what
have theories and personal sentiments to do with one another? One
should not assume, the academic sociologist might say, that
theories need to be consonant with men’s sentiments before they
are accepted or rejected. However, my own contrary assumption
— to be elaborated later — is that the fit between theories and
sentiments has a good deal to do with the career of a theory. Much
of the theoretical apathy of some young radicals, their ritual
Marxism, their efforts to restore the young Marx of alienation, or
their clutching at new theories such as ethnomethodology, all are,
I believe, various expressions of the existence of an unfilled theo-
retical need that derives from the gap between their own new
structure of sentiments or their own sense of what is real, on the
one hand, and, on the other hand, the older theories now available
in the academic and social surround.

As some young American radicals now experience it, their im-
portant need at this moment in history is to activate and to assert
their emerging radical sentiments, and to consolidate and to pre-
serve their new radical identity. It may be that in the beginning
this can be done by a militant politics of activistic demonstration.

8 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

R. D. Laing, whose views have often articulated the feelings of
young radicals, has expressed this well in his Politics of Experience,
where he remarks: “No one can begin to think, feel or act now
except from the starting point of his own alienation ... we do not
need theory so much as the experience that is the source of the
theory.” 3

The feeling that one’s sentiments are valid, that one has a right
to have and to hold them, is rooted partially in the sense of reality
that derives from personal experience and in the solidarity with
others who share these experiences and sentiments. The felt
validity of sentiments is thus fundamentally a matter of consensual
validation, not of analytic power, or refined conceptualization, or
even of “evidence.” The young radical thus draws lines in terms of
generational solidarities and cleavages, of emotional rather than
ideological affinities: “trust no one over thirty.” Whether or not
it “should be,” social theory is always rooted in the theorist’s experi-
ences. Whether or not it should be, the sensed validity of a theory
depends therefore upon the sharing of experience and of the
sentiments to which such experience gives rise, among those who
offer and those who listen to the theory.

Apart from the sheer cultural obsolescence of traditional social
theories because of their rooting in older personal realities, and
apart from the inability of old theories to resonate new sentiments,
theory is sometimes suspect today because it is something received
from the past. Theory is commonly transmitted by older men to
younger men who are in some way dependent upon them. The
theoretical apathy of a young radical is thus sometimes an expres-
sion of his vigorous striving toward individuality and autonomy,
and of his need to become and live as a man, and, if possible,
as a better man than his elders have been. Somewhere in the
young radical’s thoughts is the suspicion that not only are received,
traditional theories wrong or irrelevant, but that they are also
unmanly; he sees them as the timidity-generating creations of
timid men.

Still not "professionalized,” the young radical does not view a
theory as pure, isolated, and alone, but sees through the theory
to the theorist. He sees theory as a communication by a whole
man. His judgment about a theory and theorizing will be influenced
by his feeling about the whole man who produces it. And he often
sees this man as someone who has “copped out,” retreated from
life’s struggles, compromised his own highest ideals, accommodated
himself to injustice and suffering, and made a comfortable career
out of studying the misery of others. The young radical observes
that, for all his sympathetic writing about the “culture of poverty,”
the social scientist, nevertheless, does not share his book royalties

Introduction: Toward a Critique of Sociology 9

even with the poor whom he has studied and who have made them
possible. The young radical observes that, for all his sympathetic
commentary about the suffering of Blacks, hardly any sociologist of
repute can be recruited to teach in Black colleges in the south. The
young radical’s grievance is often, then, that the sociologist and
social theorist is not a whole man, and that his life does not give
consistent expression to his own values. In short, he is prone to see
the sociologist as he sees other elders, as something of an exploiter
and hypocrite. He observes that there are no martyrs among
sociologists.

Interpreting social theory in terms of what he sees in the theorist,
and viewing it as a falsification of what he himself has seen in the
social world, the young radical often defines all of Academic
Sociology and social theory as an undifferentiated obfuscation of
life, as an ideology discolored by a pervasive conservative bias in
the service of the status quo.

SOCIOLOGY AND THE NEW LEFT: A PARADOX

Yet there is a deepgoing paradox here, and the young radical him-
self has already begun to confront it. Some, for example, have
noticed that in the past decade or so an Academic Sociology akin
to that in the United States has also emerged in the Soviet Union,
alongside of traditional Marxism-Leninism. This development has
been intellectually troublesome to those radicals who, out of a
rote Marxism, have concluded that American Academic Sociology
is an instrument of American corporate capitalism. For clearly the
conservative character of American sociology cannot be attributed
to its subservience to corporate capitalism if an essentially similar
sociology has emerged where, as in the Soviet Union, there is no
corporate capitalism.

But this is only one of the paradoxes generated by a blanket
critique that views all of sociology as the conservative instrument
of a repressive society. For example, many of the most visible
leaders of student rebellions throughout the world, from Nanterre
to Columbia Universities, have been students of sociology. France’s
Cohn-Bendit is just one of the most obvious cases in point. Leslie
Fiedler has more generally observed that “at the root of any
[student] demonstration there is a character who is ... a student
of sociology . . . [and] a Jew . . . [and] an outsider,” or who possesses
at least two of these characteristics.* Without endorsing the validity

io Sociolog) - : Contradictions and Infrastructure

of all of Mr. Fiedler’s designations, I do believe that there is con-
siderable merit in his observation of the prominent role of young
sociologists in current student rebellions. Yet, if this is so, how
can sociology be an unmitigated expression of political con-
servatism?

Another version of this paradox was evidenced at the Boston
meetings of the American Sociological Association in August 1968.
There were, in a way, actually two concurrent meetings at Boston:
the official one, routinely managed by the American Sociological
Association; and, alongside of it, a series of unscheduled “shadow”
meetings, organized by the young men and women of the “radical
caucus,” the Sociology Liberation Movement, with a noticeable
leavening of Columbia University militants. These two tracks
paralleled one another without touching until the climactic plenary
session of the asa meetings, when more than a thousand gathered
to hear the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Scheduled
to have been a dull, honorific occasion, it became what may in
a modest way be an historic event when asa President Philip M.
Hauser, having heard that the radical caucus planned to demon-
strate at the secretary’s talk, invited the caucus to express its
dissenting views from the platform.

The key dissenting talk was made by a young sociologist, Martin
Nicolaus, then from Canada’s Simon Fraser University and one of
the contributing editors of the New Left journal, Viet Report. In
icy, measured tones, Mr. Nicolaus declared:

The Secretary of hew is a military officer in the domestic front of the
war against the people . . . the Department of which the man is head is
more accurately described as the agency which watches over the in-
equitable distribution of preventable diseases, over the funding of do-
mestic propaganda and indoctrination, over the preservation of a cheap
and docile labor force. . . . This assembly [of sociologists] here tonight
... is a conclave of high and low priests, scribes, intellectual valets, and
their innocent victims, engaged in the mutual affirmation of a falsehood
. . . the profession is an outgrowth of nineteenth -century European tra-
ditionalism and conservatism, wedded to twentieth-century American
corporation liberalism . . . the professional eyes of the sociologist are
on the down people, and the professional palm of the sociologist is
stretched toward the up people ... he is an Uncle Tom not only for
this government and ruling class but for any.

These harsh words were applauded vigorously by the caucus and
its sympathizers, hissed by a few of the older ex-radicals, and met
by a larger group with shocked, stony forbearance. Now, even those
who concur, as I do, in many of Mr. Nicolaus’ acerbic judgments,
must also acknowledge that their sheer utterance implies a
dilemma. It is not so much that he was allowed to speak by

Introduction: Toward a Critique of Sociology 11

officials of the asa that expresses this dilemma, but, rather, that
he wanted to speak. It was not so much that he was allowed to
say what he saw, but that he saw as much as he did, that expresses
the dilemma. For Nicolaus' very utterances, as well as the vigor
and activity of the radical caucus at this same convention, them-
selves demonstrate that not all sociologists are “intellectual valets”
and that not all are “Uncle Toms” of the ruling class.

There is a problem here: How can one account for the very
radicalism of those sociologists who accuse sociology of being
conservative? Much of what I say in subsequent chapters will,
indeed, stress the conservative character of certain dominant trends
in American sociology. At the same time, however, the fact that it
is often sociologists themselves who criticize sociology for being
conservative implies that sociology may produce radicals as well
as conservatives. My point then is that sociology may produce, not
merely recruit, radicals: that it may generate, not merely tolerate,
radicalization.

It is undoubtedly correct that sociolog)’ often attracts young men
and women of reformist inclination and prior radical outlook, and
that some of their subsequent criticism of sociology may indeed
derive from their frustrated expectations. Yet I doubt that this is
the whole story. For there are other questions that need to be con-
sidered: If sociology often attracts radicals, what is there about
sociology itself that attracts them? Can we believe that the young
reformer's initial attraction to sociology w'as simply a case of mis-
taken identity?

Moreover, it is certain that many, but not all, of the radicals
attracted become conservative. Not all the young socialists of the
ig3o’s who became sociologists also became pillars of the status
quo, and neither wall all those of the New Left of today. While it
cannot be central to the volume that follows and will not be ex-
amined here in any detail, I believe that there are aspects of the
character of and outlook intrinsic to Academic Sociology itself that
sustain rather than tame the radical impulse. I believe that, in the
normal course of working as a sociologist, there are things that
happen that may radicalize a man and have a liberating rather
than repressive effect upon him. In brief, and in the language of a
non-Academic Sociology, I believe that sociology has its own “in-
ternal contradictions,” which, despite its powerful link to the status
quo and its deepgoing conservative bent, have the unwitting but
inherent consequence of fostering anti-Establishment and radical-
izing tendencies, particularly among young people.

The relationship between sociology and the New Left is a com-
plex one. Certainly I do not intend to imply that it was the
emergence of sociology and its penetration into popular culture

Introduction: Toward a Critique of Sociology 13

autonomous standards, this is a value choice that cannot be justi-
fied by "purely scientific" considerations alone; it depends upon
anterior, nonscientific assumptions about what a social science is
for. That the ideological implications and social consequences of
an intellectual system do not determine its validity, for theory does

* *4

indeed have a measure of autonomy, is not in the least denied here.
Certainly the cognitive validity of an intellectual system cannot
and should not be judged by its ideological implications or its social
consequences. But it does not follow from this that an intellectual
system should be (or, for that matter, ever is) judged only in terms
of its cognitive validity, its truth or falsity. In short, it is never
simply a question of whether an intellectual system, or a statement
that it implies, is true or false. Those who affirm that it is are
simply choosing to ignore or to devalue other meanings and con-
sequences of theories, and are in effect refusing to take responsi-
bility for them even though they do exist.

There is no reason why one should be required to evaluate the
formula for a new poison gas solely in terms of its mathematical
elegance or of other purely technical criteria. And there is little
point in pretending that such a formula is a purely neutral bit of
information, useful for the furtherance of any and all social values-,
the thing is meant to kill and, precisely because it is technically
adequate, it does so. To limit judgment solely to "autonomous"
technical criteria is in effect not only to allow but to require men to
be moral cretins in their technical roles. It is to make psychopathic
behavior culturally required in the conduct of scientific roles. Inso-
far as our culture conventionally construes technical, scientific, and
professional roles as those that obligate men to ignore all but the
technical implications of their work, the very social structure itself
is inherently pathogenic. The social function of such a segmented
role structure is akin to that of the reflexive obedience induced by
military training. The function of such a technical role structure,
as of military discipline, is to sever the normal moral sensibilities
and responsibilities of civilians and soldiers, and to enable them
to be used as deployables, willing to pursue practically any ob-
jective. In the last analysis, such arrangements produce an un-
thinking readiness to kill or to hurt others — or to produce things
that do so — on order.

The extrication of the liberative potential of Academic Sociolog)',
no less than that of historical Marxism, is not to be accomplished
by research alone. It will also require action and criticism, efforts
to change the social world and efforts to change social science, both
of which are profoundly interconnected, if for no other reason than
that social science is a part of the social world as well as a con-
ception of it.

Sociolog}': Contradictions and Infrastructure

In a later study I hope to be able to contribute to a sociologically
informed critique of Marxism. In this volume, however, I shall
seek to contribute to a critique of modem sociolog}' in some of its
dominant institutional and intellectual characteristics, as a part of
a larger critique of modern society and culture. The critique of
contemporary society cannot be deepened except insofar as the
intellectual instruments of this critique, including sociology and
the other social sciences, are themselves critically sharpened.
Correspondingly, a critique of sociology will be superficial unless
the discipline is seen as the flawed product of a flawed society and
unless we begin to specify the details of this interconnection. What
is required therefore is an analysis on different levels, in which
sociology is seen in its relation to larger historical trends, to the
macro-institutional level, and especially to the state; it also means
seeing sociology in the setting of its most immediate locale, the
university; it means seeing it as a way in which men work as.
teachers and researchers, and operate within an intellectual com-
munity with a received occupational culture, where they pursue
careers, livelihoods, material ambitions, as well as intellectual
aspirations.

Finally, and centrally, a critique of sociology also requires de-
tailed and specific analysis of the dominant theoretical and in-
tellectual products that sociology has created. It is these intellectual
products that distinguish sociology from other activities, that justify
its existence, and that produce its distinctive impact on the larger
surrounding society. There can be no serious critique of sociology
without a fine-grained, close analysis of its theories and its
theorists.

The intellectual scope and output of modem sociology, let alone
the sheer size of its operating establishments and the number of
its personnel, are vast and complex; there can be no question,
therefore, of exhaustive coverage of all its varying expressions and
tendencies, here in this volume. Rather than a superficial effort at
pseudo-systematic and exhaustive coverage, what I have therefore
essayed is a close critique of a few important standpoints and
issues: in particular, of what is by far the dominant system of
American social theory, namely, that created by Talcott Parsons.
Laborious though this effort will doubtless seem at times, let me
repeat that I view it only as a very partial contribution to a critique
of American sociology.

I am convinced that the extrication of the liberative potential
of sociology today cannot be effected by sweeping generalizations
that ignore detail; it must proceed by confronting the theories,
point by point, and the theorists, man by man. This process, of
working through the details of these theories and our own reactions

Introduction: Toward a Critique of Sociology - 15

to them, is necessary if we are to transcend them, liberate our-
selves from their penetrating conservative influence, and incor-
porate their viable dimensions in new standpoints. Without this
painful process, a radical criticism of society or sociology runs
the continual risk of falling into a sterile polemicism that yields
no enduring guidance and will be dangerously lacking in self-
awareness.

Just as the sharpest critics of Marxism have usually been
Marxists, the keenest critics of sociolog}' today have usually been
sociologists and students of sociolog}’. They have commonly been
men who regard themselves as sociologists and who have critically
evaluated sociolog}' from a sociological perspective. Their prototype,
of course, is C. Wright Mills. Thus even the most polemical of
their criticisms have an ambiguous implication. At one and the
same time, they testify both to the profound flaws and to the
continuing value, to the painful predicaments and to the perduring
potentialities, of the sociological perspective.

Often enough the men whose rejection of such criticism is most
vehement are those who live off sociolog}', while the most vehement
critics are those who live for it. Often, but not always. For it is
well to notice that there are critics and critics. They too may be
divided among those who live for and those who live off sociology.
Criticism is sometimes a way in which men can draw a quick
notice to themselves without making solid contributions of their
own. In short, men sometimes play the critic because they expect
that the door to repute can be opened with a key of brass. The
serious critics, however, are those marked by an ability to resist
conventional success or by an ability to transcend failure as con-
ventionally defined. C. Wright Mills never became a full professor;
his “failure” may remind us that the serious players are always
those w’ho have an ability to pay costs.

CRITICISM AND THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

We might suggest that those who live off sociolog}' in the most
opportunistic ways, in brief, the careerists who accept sociolog}'
very largely as it is, are not, strangely enough, the most ambitious.
In a w'ay, their very careerism tokens a low level of ambition, or
at least a type of ambition relatively easily satisfied within the
framework of a routine career. The most unswerving critics of an
intellectual establishment, those who cannot be satisfied by and

x 6 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

within it, axe usually those who do not treasure the coin of its
realm, but value other, rather different kinds of fulfillments. Often
these are attainable only by men with a vivid historical sense, who
view themselves as historical actors and as part of a longer social
and intellectual tradition. In effect, the gratifications they seek
cannot be given them by their contemporaries, and the responsi-
bilities they feel are not to contemporaries alone. They are there- •
fore less vulnerable to the temptations and seductions of the
present. From the standpoint of their more conventional contem-
poraries, such men are often seen as flawed. Yet they are frequently
flawed in a productive manner; for being less subject to the influ-
ence of the dominant surround, they are often critically sensitive
to the limitations of established intellectual paradigms and can
work in a manner that is creatively at variance with them.

One of the most important functions of the “classics” in sociology
is to root the sociologist in history and to enable him to live among
and to take the role of truly great men. The classics implant stand-
ards of great, though often unfulfillable, achievement; they make
it difficult for a man to be impressed or intimidated by those
around him. An historical approach to theory puts one in the
company of greatness, and it inevitably raises the standard, by
which one measures accomplishment. History thus insulates us
from the vulgarities, no less than the gratifications, of the present.

Yet to be in love with history is dangerous, for in delivering us
from the present, it may also place us in . bondage to the past. It
may induce an insensitivity to the new problems or needs of the „
present as well as to the novelty and genuine creativity of new
responses to these new needs. It may produce an interminable,'
pedantic exegesis of the past and encourage a petulant refusal to
acknowledge contemporary achievement as valuably new. The
historically sensitive critic who lives too much in the shadow of the
great may suffer a failure of nerve that paralyzes his creative
originality; he may therefore devalue the achievements of his peers
and contemporaries. In short, his criticism of contemporaries may
be animated not only by their failure to measure up to the stand-
ards of greatness but also by his own. The life of criticism is there-
fore a precarious one not only because those criticized take a dim
view' of the critic, but also because it produces inner vulnerabilities
that easily sour the critic. Yet the continuing development of the
social sciences and its liberative potential cannot be accomplished
without risking the sharpest criticism.

During an earlier period, prior to the present full-scale effort
to professionalize sociology, career-seeking young men often mani-
fested their mettle by' assaulting the ideas of their seniors and,
what some thought to be safer, those of classical sociologists now

Introduction: Toward a Critique of Sociology 17

safely deceased. With the growth of professionalization, however,
young sociologists were increasingly encouraged to seek out what
was “right” in the work of others, not what was wrong. In effect
they were enjoined to adopt a constructive attitude, a positive
rather than a critical or negative attitude. Rather than a call for
criticism, the watchwords of professionalized sociology became:
continuity, codification, convergence, and cumulation. Talcott
Parsons’' Structure of Social Action was the paradigm of such a
posture, and its ideology of “continuity” was taken up and amplified
by his students.

This ideology is essentially an extension of the perspective that
nineteenth-century sociological Positivism developed in the course
of its opposition to what it regarded as the “negative” criticism of
the French Revolution and the philosophes. The modern ideology
of continuity is an extension of this earlier Positivist view of society
into a view of sociology itself, into the methodology of scholarly
practice, and into the training of the young scholar. The search
for convergences with and in the past, for which it calls, seeks to
reveal a tacit consensus of great minds and, by showing this, to
lend credence to the conclusions that they are held to have con-
verged upon unwittingly. Convergence thus becomes a rhetoric, a
way of persuading men to accept certain views. The implication is
that if these great men, tacitly or explicitly, agreed on a given
view, it must have a prima facie cogency. Convergence, then, is
one way in which views come, in practice, to be “tested,” even
though this is at variance with the canons of scientific method
formally espoused by these same men.

The. ideology of convergence implies that if great theorists can
be shown to have come to a consensus unbeknownst to themselves,
then it is these tacit agreements that are theoretically productive,
rather than the polemics to which the men themselves often gave
focal attention. Underneath the manifest disagreements of theory,
the cunning of history — it is implied — has contrived to produce
a truly valuable residue of intellectual consensus. This is an
Americanized version of Hegelianism, in which historical develop-
ment presumably occurs not through polemic, struggle, and con-
flict, but through consensus.

The theorist proceeding in this manner has found an ingenious
way of linking his own position to the past, while at the same time
manifesting his own superiority to it. Seemingly subordinating his
own claims to personal priority, in apparent conformity to a higher,
selfless principle, the theorist puts himself forward modestly, as a
discoverer of consensus rather than as an originator of ideas. Yet
in the very act of “discovering” theoretical convergences and con-
tinuities in the work of earlier men, and in particular by holding

x 8 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

that these were unwitting, the modem theorist tacitly presents
himself as now revealing things hitherto hidden from the founding
fathers, and as saying them more precisely and clearly. For all his
decorous regard for the past, the contemporary exponent of con-
tinuity thus manages to communicate his own originality and
creativity.

The call to intellectual convergence and cumulation began to
crystallize in the United States under certain distinctive social
conditions. It began to emerge with — and it congenially resonated
— sentiments appropriate to the “united front” solidarity of the
political and military struggle against Nazism. It was in effect
the academic counterpart of wartime domestic unity and of inter-
national unity between the Western powers and the Soviet Union.
In short, the American call to convergence and continuity in social
theory had its social foundation in collective sentiments that
favored all kinds of social unity, and which had developed in re-
sponse to the military and political exigencies of World War II.
Correspondingly, however, with the breakdown of national unity
after the war as well as with the later growth of widespread racial
conflict and student rebellion, the ideology of convergence and
continuity no longer resonated collective sentiment. A more critical
standpoint could re-emerge.

The ideology of convergence and continuity, however, did not
only reflect general national and international conditions, but was
also congenial to the drive to professionalize sociology that was
mounted about the same time. For such an ideology is less con-
genial to men who see themselves as intellectuals than to those
who aspire to be professionals and technicians. The call to con-
tinuity and convergence is a methodological slogan more congenial
to the guild-like sentiments of professionals, who commonly affirm
their solidarity and who deplore the indecorous public display of
their internal disputes. If this slogan of “continuity-convergence”
serves to strengthen the mutual solidarity of professionals, it most
often does so, however, at the cost of a blanketing mood of con-
sensus that smothers intellectual criticism and innovation. If it
opens some bridges to the past, it does so at the cost of barricading
bridges to the future. There is no possible way of transcending the
present and the past from which it derives, without a thorough-
going criticism of it. And there is no way of moving beyond con-
temporary sociology without a criticism of its theory and its
practice, its establishments and its ideas.

Introduction: Toward a Critique of Sociology

NOTES

j. "Interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit,” Out Generation, VI, Nos. 1-2
(May, June, July 1968), 98-99.

2. John and Barbara Ehrenreich, “The European Student Movements,”
Monthly Review, XX (September 1968), 17.

3. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballandne Books,
1968), pp. 12, 17.

4. Village Voice, September 19, 1968, p. 59.

CHAPTER

Sociology and Sub- Sociology

Seeded in Western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, sociology lay in a territory that did not know what to do with
the new discipline. Sociology did not find its first supporting en-
vironment or first achieve successful institutionalization in Western
Europe. Its most fertile ground was in time found elsewhere in the
East and West. Sociology achieved successful embodiment in sup-
porting establishments only after it underwent a kind of “binary
fission,” only after the two parts into which it became differentiated
found different strata and different nations to sponsor it. One part
of sociology, “Marxism,” moved eastward and became at length,
after World War I, the official social science of the then new
Soviet Union. The other part, which I will call “Academic Soci-
ology," moved westward and came to a different kind of fruition
within American culture. Both are different sides of Western
sociology.

The diffusion of sociology in each direction was carried by a
different social stratum. Marxism was borne by unattached in-
telligentsia, by political groups and parties oriented to lower strata
groups who were in rebellion against an emerging bourgeois society
that excluded them. Academic Sociology was developed in the
United States by university academicians who were oriented to
the established middle class, and who sought pragmatically to re-
form rather than systematically to rebel against the status quo.
Both, however, were early linked with social movements, in
particular to what Anthony Wallace has called movements of
“cultural revitalization.” Each embodied a different conception of

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 21

how the established order around it was failing and needed re-
vision. and each had its own vision of a new social order.

After World War I, American sociolog)' found itself becoming
entrenched at the University of Chicago, in a metropolitan en-
vironment in which industrialism had burgeoned and was pro-
liferating problems. It conceived of these as the problems of "urban
communities.” That is, they were viewed as due to the vast size
and anonymity of urban communities, which were taken to be
essentially alike, rather than as varying with the economy, the
class system, or the property institutions of the particular city.

Marxism, on the other hand, took root in parts of Europe where
industrialization had been slow and relatively retarded. When the
Leninist version of Marxism seized power in Russia, its task was
to accelerate and to consolidate industrialization. Marxism had
defined European problems as essentially due to “capitalism,” that
is, to the perpetuation of an archaic class system and of property
institutions that were seen as, at some point, impeding industrial
development.

Early Marxism and Academic Sociology both agreed that modem
society was experiencing problems that could be solved only by
building or borrowing new patterns. Certainly neither thought that
its culture’s problems were due to the intrusion of “alien” elements
that would now have to be expelled, or to the neglect or disuse of
old traditional elements that could be restored. While Academic
Sociolog)' sometimes looked nostalgically to the past to find models
for the future and sometimes judged the fragmented city in terms
of the more cohesive rural countryside, it knew it could not go
back. Both Academic Sociology and Marxism understood that
something new was needed; and each thought its sociology could
help surmount the defects of the society in which it found itself.
They differed, however, in that Academic Sociology tended to
think that the problems would in time be remedied by a society
that it regarded as slowly maturing and fundamentally sound,
while Marxism viewed these problems as rooted in conflicts in-
herent in the new society and therefore insoluble within its master
framework.

The two sociologies were fostered by, and their fortunes varied
with, the two nations by which they came to be sponsored. Follow-
ing the Soviet Revolution, there were some efforts to continue the
intellectual development of Marxism there, but these, closely con-
nected with violent political struggles in that society, were soon
brought to a halt. With the growth of Stalinism, Marxism in the
Soviet Union ceased to develop intellectually, and because of its
international dominance over Marxism elsewhere, even the theo-
retical creativity of a Georg Lukacs or an Antonio Gramsei re-

22 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

mained largely unassimilated until the crackup of Stalinism follow-
ing World War II.

In the United States, sociology took hold as an academic disci-
pline during the 1920’s largely under the aegis of the University of
Chicago. It began to move eastward during the 1930’s, and its
continued development, during the 1940’s and 1950’s, was domi-
nated by Harvard and Columbia Universities. By the mid-i 960’s,
with the financing of the Welfare State, American sociology be-
came more institutionally polycentric; the hegemony of these three
leading sociological centers became less pronounced with the
growth of competing centers elsewhere in the country. In the view
of many American sociologists, during the 1960’s the dominant
American center had moved once more, this time to the University
of California at Berkeley.

Although conceived in Western Europe, then, one form of
sociology achieved its most powerful social impact and influence
in Eastern Europe, while another found a supportive environment
in the United States, where it became institutionalized within the
university system.

The tremendous growth of sociology in the United States is one
manifestation of the continuing efforts of American culture to
explore, to cope with, and to control its changing environment.
Sociology has grown as rapidly as perhaps any other aspect of
American intellectual culture. To much of the world today, soci-
ology is practically synonymous with American sociology. The
preeminence of American sociology in its professional sphere
throughout the world may be even greater than the corresponding
world influence of most other American cultural efforts, even of
American mathematics, physics, or the other physical sciences. Its
techniques are everywhere emulated, and its theories shape the
terms in which world discussion of sociology is cast and the issues
around which intellectual debate centers.

In two generations, American sociologists devised a number of
research techniques and invented another handful of complex
theoretical perspectives; they completed and published thousands
of researches; they trained a cadre of full-time specialists at least
two or three times larger than that of all European countries com-
bined; they established many new periodicals, research institutes,
departments; they developed academic influence and won wide
public attention, if not uniform respect; and they committed every
form of gaucherie and vulgarity that can be expected of an arriviste
discipline. Yet, for all its vulnerabilities, it did establish itself firmly
as a part of American culture, and each year sees it even more
deeply institutionalized in the United States. The modem era, as

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 23

C. Wright Mills said, is indeed the era of sociology. And this is
largely because it is the era of the Welfare State.

After World War II and under the stimulus of the Welfare
State, American sociology grew at a more rapid rate than ever
before. As it grew, sociology increasingly lost its academic isolation,
and sociologists were exposed to new pressures, temptations, and
opportunities. Sociologists began to peer increasingly into the
cracks and crannies of their own culture, often unrecognized by
other middle-class professionals. At the same time they began
traveling abroad more than ever before and began experiencing
a reverberating “culture shock.” Sociologists, then, grew more
numerous, more worldly, more experienced, more affluent, more
powerful, and more academically secure. They have, especially
since World War II, gone up in the world. Often, all too often, this
has meant a smug complacency; but occasionally it has also meant
that some sociologists developed a greater need to reformulate their
own deeply held intellectual perspectives.

These recent developments within the sociological establishment
in America have merged with others external to it, with new and
mounting social problems both domestic and foreign. It is thus
almost certain that American sociology will soon undergo profound
and radical changes. At the same time that these factors bring
American sociology to the threshold of a basic reorientation, other
developments at the eastern perimeter of European culture, in the
Soviet world, also tesu'fy to changes in their sociology that promise
to be no less profound and critical. Although painfully slow and far
from fully underway, the process of unthawing Soviet Marxism is
clearly visible. It appears, then, that the two major poles around
which world sociology developed during the last half century,
Academic Sociology in the United States and Marxism in the Soviet
Union, are more or less simultaneously being exposed to powerful
social forces that will move each toward major change. As with the
prongs of a tuning fork, the movements of each will resonate the
other, accelerating the crisis in sociology throughout rJ : -

I have said that American sociology today is tor practica
purposes, the model of Academic Sociology th' ou g^ out w0
One of the problems to which the discus rlon t ^ iat f°N° ws
address itself is an effort to sketch out a preliminary answer to
the question: What is an Academic Soc :0 ^°Sy^ The question can-
not be answered, even in a preliminary v ra Y> however, by restricting
attention to American sociology. We cannot begin to understan
Academic Sociology except historicafly> as having come from some-
where and as going somewhere, an* 3 I shall therefore have to roam
broadly in search of an answer. * shall suggest that recent Soviet

24 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

developments offer some interesting clues about the social origins
of Academic Sociology. Like other sociologists of my time, I have
witnessed some of the events to be discussed. I shall therefore refer
occasionally to things that I have seen and heard at first hand,
either through casual encounter or deliberate study. In doing so,
however, it is not my intention to insinuate a place for myself
among the men whose work I shall call into evidence. Yet, like
any other man, I must place reliance as much on my own personal
experience as on the books I have read.

What, then, is Academic Sociology, and who is the Academic
sociologist? It is a curious question, because today most sociolo-
gists think it hardly worth raising except in the most elementary
textbooks, where the answer commonly given is correspondingly
simplistic.

At the beginnings of French sociology, after Henri Saint-Simon
had died, his students began a series of lectures. On one street
there were lectures given by Auguste Comte, and on another there
were competitive lectures given by Enfantin and Bazard. Each kept
circling around this question : Who and what is the sociologist? In
the end, all of them made it clear that they were bent on establish-
ing a new religion, a religion of humanity, and that they believed
its priesthood would be sociologists. In short, the sociologist was
first conceived as a kind of priest.

It might be thought that this linkage between priest and sociolo-
gist existed only at the beginnings of sociology, but is now archaic
and no longer exists for the modern, professionally-oriented soci-
ology. Such a conclusion, however, may well be premature. In a
study of the American Sociological Association, Timothy Sprehe
and I polled its 6,762 members by mail on a variety of questions.
Among the 3,441 who replied, it was found that, as late as 1964,
more than one-quarter (27.6 per cent) of the sociologists who
responded had thought, at one time or another, of becoming clergy-
men. Moreover, as I shall discuss at a later point, those who were
dominant school of sociological thought, Function-
alism, were morb likely to have thought of becoming clergymen
and to attend church more frequently than those who were un-
friendly toward it. '

Sociology and Sub-Sociology

TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF SOCIOLOGY

Outlandish as this early priestly conception of the sociologist may
now seem, it gave an answer to the question of who the sociologist
is that is probably far more serious, and certainly more interesting,
than the one sociologists now conventionally give. Oirr usual
answer today is that the sociologist is someone who studies group
life, examines man-in-society, and does researches into human
relationships. Now this is not a very serious answer. It is as if a
policeman were to describe his role by saying that he catches
criminals; as if a businessman were to say, he makes soap; as if a
priest were to say, he celebrates mass; as if a congressman were to
say, he passes laws. While none of these answers is in itself untrue,
they all betray a narrowness of vision. The answer is restricted to
some part of what each is supposed to do, in effect reassuring us
that he is doing what he should be; but it gives us little inkling of
his full role in the larger scheme of things. Such an answer is for-
givable when made by a policeman or a businessman; but it is
difficult to avoid the feeling that, when made by a sociologist, it is
peculiarly inappropriate and, in a way, self-contradictory. For if,
as the sociologist says, it is his special job to see man-in-society,
then shouldn't he also see and talk about himself in society?

Unfortunately, no more than other men do sociologists tell us
what they are really doing in the world, as distinct from what they
think they should be doing. Here in this study, however, I am very
much concerned with what sociologists, and particularly social
theorists, are really up to. I greatly doubt that all they are doing
in the world can be described by saying that they study it. I greatly
doubt that all they want from the world is just to be adequately
supported but otherwise left alone, so that they can continue to
study it.

The sociologists' task today is not only to see people as they see
themselves, nor to see themselves as others see them; it is also to
see themselves as they see other people. What is needed is a new'
and heightened self-av'areness among sociologists, which would
lead them to ask the same kinds of questions about themselves as
they do about taxicab drivers or doctors, and to answer them in the
same ways. Above all, this means that we must acquire the in-
grained habit of viewing our ora beliefs as we would those held
by others. It means, for example, that when we are asked why it
is that some sociologists believe sociolog)’ must be a “value-free

26 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

discipline,” we do not simply reply with the logical arguments on
its behalf. Sociologists must surrender the human but elitist
assumption that others believe out of need whereas they believe
because of the dictates of logic and reason.'^ \y \3

It will be relatively easy for sociologists to adopt such a stand-
point with respect to their professional beliefs; it will be far harder,
however, for them to do so with respect to their scientific beliefs
and behavior. It will be difficult for them to feel in their bones, for
example, that “scientific method” is not simply a logic but also
a morality; that it is, moreover, the ideology of a small-scale social
movement whose object is the reform — a very singular and dis-
tinctive kind of reform — of sociology itself, and whose social
character is not much different from that of any other social
movement. It will be extremely difficult for many sociologists to
recognize that we presently lack any serious understanding of how
it happens that one piece of social research is regarded as good and
another as poor, or why it is that sociologists move from one theory
to another. For, like other men, sociologists still commonly confuse
the moral answer with the empirical, thinking that what should be,
is. That is, we too readily suppose that a change, particularly if it
is to a theory that we ourselves happen to accept, has been made
primarily because it was required by the findings of studies done in
conformity with scientific method; we thus hasten to affirm our
moral convictions rather than allow the question to remain un-
answered until the studies, by which alone it could be answered,
have been done. L O ^ & 5 M

Sociologists must cease assuming that there are two distinct
breeds of men, subjects and objects, sociologists and laymen, whose
behavior needs to be viewed in different ways. There is only one
race of men; it is time we sociologists acknowledged all the im-
plications of our membership in it. Like other sociologists, I will
undoubtedly have difficulty in viewing sociologists as just another
tribe in the race of men, but I mean to go as far as I can in this
direction.

My aim, then, is to search out some critical understanding of
the social mission of Academic Sociology, and to formulate some
tentative ideas about the social mandate with which it operates,
the ideologies it expresses, and the link it has to the larger society.
An effort will be made to define the character of Academic
Sociology by focusing on its dominant school of thought, Function-
alism, and its dominant theorist, Talcott Parsons. While his stand-
point is by no means the only one in American sociology today, it
is without doubt the leading one. Any effort to understand the
changes impending in American sociology today must confront its
central intellectual tendencies. And since intellectual tendencies

UNIVERSITY OF JODHPUR LIBRAB&

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 27

do not develop in a social vacuum, any effort to understand Ameri-
can sociolog}' today must relate it to the nature and problems of
the society in which it developed. In a later section. I shall briefly
explore certain emerging characteristics of the new sociology in
Eastern Europe, which I had opportunity to witness during 1965
and ig66. One of the most important reasons for focusing on the
new sociology of Eastern Europe is that it provides a case of the
emergence of an academic type of sociology in statu nascenai: it
can thus refine our understanding of the social conditions under
which an Academic Sociolog}' emerges and help provide a basis
for answering the question. What is Academic Sociolog}'?

THE CHARACTER OF SOCIOLOGY

How and where one seeks this answer will depend, of course, on
how sociology is conceived, on what it is taken to be. In their image
of sociology, many practitioners stress that it is a social science and
regard its scientific side as its most distinguishing and important
feature. They wish to become, and to be thought of as, scientists;
they wish to make their work more rigorous, more mathematical,
more formal, and more powerfully instrumented. To them it is the
scientific method of study itself, not the object studied or the way the
object is conceived, that is the emotionally central if not the logically
defining characteristic of sociolog}'. In contrast to such a view, held
by many but by no means all sociologists, the approach I take to the
question of the character of sociology may seem curious. I do not
intend to focus on sociology as a science, or on its “method.”

Whatever their different emphases on the place of methodo-
logical rigor in sociology, most sociologists agree that a knowledge
of social life requires that, at some point, researches be undertaken,
that suppositions be subjected to some empirical test, that logical
inferences be submitted to sensory observations. Most agree that
there must be a looking at and a listening to people. Should it not
suffice, therefore, to define the character of sociology simply in
terms of its interest in knowing the social world empirically?
Should not our question about the character of sociolog}' be con-
fined to the question: Under what conditions do men begin to
study the social world empirically? Important as this question is,
I do not think so.

One reason for not formulating the problem in this manner is
that there are many different ways in which the social world can

2,8 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

be studied, all of which may be equally scientific or empirical.
There seems no reason to believe that the work of economists,
political scientists, anthropologists, or social psychologists is less
scientific than that of sociologists, though it is often manifestly
different. Moreover, the empirical study of the social world
premises that men already have certain conceptions of it. They
have, at the very least, assumed that it is knowable by an empirical
science, much as other parts of the world are by other sciences, and
that, like them, it is possessed of lawful regularities. In short,
whether or not an empirical study of social life develops, and the
kind of study it is, depends upon certain prior assumptions about
society and men, and, indeed, certain feelings about and relations
to society and men.

Yet, if the formal purpose of sociology is to discover the character
of the social world, how can it be based upon prior assumptions
concerning this character? Doesn’t this smuggle the rabbit into
the hat and require that the things sociology discovers about the
social world be limited by, or depend upon, what it already assumes
about it? In some part this must be true; sociology can do no other.
Sociology necessarily operates within the limits of its assumptions.
But when it is acting self-consciously, it can at least put these
assumptions to the test; it can appraise which are warranted and
which are unfounded. Nonetheless, to a very large extent, these
assumptions still must provide the axis of decision and discovery;
they establish the limiting terms by which imputed attributes of
the social world are affirmed or denied.

Like it or not, and know it or not, sociologists will organize their
researches in terms of their prior assumptions; the character of
sociology will depend upon them and will change when they
change. To explore the character of a sociology, to know what a
sociology is, therefore requires us to identify its deepest assump-
tions about man and society. For these reasons it will not be to its
methods of study to which I will look for an understanding of its
character, but rather to its assumptions about man and society. The
use of particular methods of study implies the existence of par-
ticular assumptions about man and society.

When I speak of the “assumptions” that define the character
of a sociology, however, I do not limit myself to those that soci-
ologists make explicit in their "theories.” One reason for this is
that, in the last analysis, I am seeking to understand these theories
as a human and social product. I want to be able to step back from
the deliberately wrought theories, and I therefore need something
to step back onto, so that I may begin to develop ideas that can
account for the theories themselves. Ultimately, I want to be able
to explain, not only logically but sociologically, why sociologists

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 29

adopt certain theories and reject others, and why they change
from one set of theories to another. The study here is a step in
that direction.

BACKGROUND AND DOMAIN ASSUMPTIONS

Deliberately formulated social theories, we might say with de-
liberate oversimplification, contain at least two distinguishable
elements. One element is the explicitly formulated assumptions,
which may be called “postulations.” But they contain a good deal
more. They also contain a second set of assumptions that are un-
postulated and unlabeled, and these I will term "background
assumptions.” I call them background assumptions because, on the
one hand, they provide the background out of which the postula-
tions in part emerge and, on the other hand, not being expressly
formulated, they remain in the background of the theorist's atten-
tion. Postulations are brought into focalized attention, while back-
ground assumptions are part of what Michael Polanyi calls the
theorist’s “subsidiary attention.” 1 Background assumptions are em-
bedded in a theory’s postulations. Operating within and alongside
of them, they are, as it were, “silent partners” in the theoretical
enterprise. Background assumptions provide some of the bases of
choice and the invisible cement for linking together postulations.
From beginning to end, they influence a theory’s formulation and
the researchers to which it leads.

Background assumptions also influence the social career of a
theory, influencing the responses of those to whom it is com-
municated. For, in some part, theories are accepted or rejected
because of the background assumptions embedded in them. In
particular, a social theory is more likely to be accepted by those
who share the theory’s background assumptions and find them
agreeable. Over and. above their stipulated connotations, social
theories and their component concepts contain a charge of surplus
meanings derived in part from their background assumptions, and
these may congenially resonate the compatible background assump-
tions of their hearers or may generate a painful dissonance.

Commitment to a social theory, in this view, occurs through a
process rather different, and certainly more complex, than is
supposedly the case in the canons of scientific method. The latter
conceives of the process of commitment to a theory, or withdrawal

go Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

from it, very largely in cerebral and rational terms; it emphasizes
that the rejecting or accepting process is governed by a deliberate
inspection and rational appraisal of the theory’s formal logic and
supporting evidence. That sociologists content themselves with
such a limited view testifies to their readiness to explain their own
behavior in a manner radically different from that by which they
explain the behavior of others. It testifies to our readiness to
account for our own behavior as if it were shaped solely by a
willing conformity to the morality of scientific method.

That sociologists content themselves with such a view testifies
to the fact that we have failed to become aware of ourselves and
to take our own experience seriously. For as anyone who has ever
dealt with theories knows, some are in fact accepted as convincing
and others are rejected as unconvincing, long before the supporting
evidence is in hand. Students do this frequently. Some theories are
simply experienced, even by experienced sociologists, as intuitively
convincing; others are not. How does this happen? What makes a
theory intuitively convincing?

One reason is that its background assumptions coincide or are
compatible with, consensually validate or bring to psychic closure,
the background assumptions held by the viewer. The theory felt
to be intuitively convincing is commonly experienced as deja vu,
as something previously known or already suspected. It is con-
genial because it confirms or complements an assumption already
held by the respondent, but an assumption that was seen only
dimly by him precisely because it was a “background” assumption.
The intuitively convincing theory or concept is one that “sensitizes”
the viewer, as Herbert Blumer suggests; but it sensitizes him not
merely to some hidden part of the world outside, but also to some
hitherto obscured part of the world inside himself. We do not
know how much of what we now regard as “good” social theory is
favored for these reasons. We can be sure, however, that it is a
great deal more than those with scientific pretensions assume.

Background assumptions come in different sizes, they govern
domains of different scope. They are arranged, one might say, like
an inverted cone, standing on its point. At the top are background
assumptions with the largest-circumference, those that have no
limited domain to which alone they apply. These are beliefs about
the world that are so general that they may, in principle, be applied
to any subject matter without restriction. They are, as Stephan
Pepper calls them, “world hypotheses .” 2 Being primitive pre-
suppositions about the world and everything in it, they serve to
provide the most general of orientations, which enable unfamiliar
experiences to be made meaningful. They provide the terms of
reference by which the less general assumptions, further down the

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 31

cone, are themselves limited and influenced. World hypotheses are
the most pervasive and primitive beliefs about what is real. They
may involve, for example, an inclination to believe that the world
and the things in it are “really" one or are “truly" many. Or, again,
they may involve a disposition to believe that the world is “really”
highly integrated and cohesive (regardless of whether it is one or
many), or only loosely stranded together and dispersive. World
hypotheses — the cat may as well be let out of the bag — are what
are sometimes called “metaphysics.”

Background assumptions of more limited application, for ex-
ample, about man and society, are what I shall call “domain assump-
tions.” Domain assumptions are the background assumptions applied
only to members of a single domain; they are, in effect, the meta-
physics of a domain. Domain assumptions about man and society
might include, for example, dispositions to believe that men are
rational or irrational; that society is precarious or fundamentally
stable; that social problems will correct themselves without planned
intervention; that human behavior is unpredictable; that man’s true
humanity resides in his feelings and sentiments. I say that these
“might” be examples of domain assumptions made about man and
society, because whether they are or not is a matter that can be
decided finally only be determining what people, including sociolo-
gists, believe about a given domain.

Domain assumptions are of less general application than world
hypotheses, although both are background assumptions. We might
say that world hypotheses are a special or limiting case of domain
assumptions, the case in which no restrictions are applied to the
subject matter to which its assumptions refer. Domain assumptions
are the things attributed to all members of a domain; in part they
are shaped by the thinker’s world hypotheses and, in turn, they
shape his deliberately wrought theories. They are an aspect of the
larger culture that is most intimately related to the postulations of
theory. They are also one of the important links between the
theorist's work and the larger society.

There are at least two different questions that may be raised
about the role of background assumptions, whether world hypoth-
eses or domain assumptions, in social science. One is whether
social science must, for logical reasons, rest inescapably on some
such assumptions. Whether social theories unavoidably require
and must rest logically on some background assumptions is a
question that simply does not concern me here. It is, I think, an
important problem, but one primarily for logicians and philos-
ophers of science. Another question does, however, interest me.
This is whether social scientists do, in point of fact, tend to com-
mit themselves to domain assumptions about man and society, with

g 2 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

significant consequences for their theory. I think it probable and
prudent to assume that they do.

What I am saying, then, is that the work of sociologists, as of
others, is influenced by a sub-theoretical set of beliefs, for that is
what background assumptions are: beliefs about all members of
symbolically constituted domains. I am not saying that the work of
sociologists should be influenced by background assumptions; this
is a problem for methodological moralists. Nor am I saying that
sociology logically requires and necessarily rests upon background
assumptions; this is a problem for philosophers of science. What
I am saying is that sociologists do use and are influenced by back-
ground assumptions; this is an empirical matter that sociologists
themselves can study and confirm.

I think it is in the essential nature of background assumptions
that they are not originally adopted for instrumental reasons, the
way, for example, one might select a statistical test of significance
or pick a screwdriver out of a tool kit. In short, they are not
selected with a calculated view to their utility. This is so because
they are often internalized in us long before the intellectual age of
consent. They are affectively-laden cognitive tools that are devel-
oped early in the course of our socialization into a particular culture
and are built deeply into our character structure. They are therefore
likely to change with changes in modal or “social character,” to vary
with changes in socialization experiences and practices, and there-
fore to differ with different age or peer groups.

We begin the lifelong process of learning background assump-
tions while learning our first language, for the language gives us
categories that constitute the domains to which the domain as-
sumptions refer. As we learn the categories and the domains that
they demarcate, we also acquire a variety of assumptions or beliefs
about all members of the domain. In simple truth, all of these
domain-constituting categories derive from and function in much
the same manner as “stereotypes.” Thus, as children are taught the
category of Negro, they also learn certain background assump-
tions — and “prejudices” — about Negroes. Certain existential back-
ground assumptions are learned about what Negroes presumably
are, for example, “lazy and shiftless.” We also learn normative
background assumptions, that is, beliefs about their moral value,
their goodness or badness. Indeed, normative and existential as-
sumptions are so closely intertwined as to be inseparable, except
analytically. In a similar way, we learn linguistic categories such
as man, society, group, friend, parent, poor, woman; accompanying
each of these are background assumptions, dispositions to attribute
certain things to all members of the constituted domain. For ex-
ample, friends are helpful, or will betray you; man is a weak, or a

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 33

strong, animal; society is powerful, or precarious; the poor are
deserving, or undeserving.

The domains that come to be constituted vary with the languages
learned and used, and the background assumptions accompanying
them vary with the cultures or subcultures in which they are
learned and used. To suggest that they operate in much the same
manner as racial stereotypes and prejudices entails a set of strong
and specifiable assumptions: (1) there is a disposition to believe
that there are certain attributes that will be manifested by all
members of the domain, which (2) is acquired well before the
believer has had a personal experience with anything like a true
sample of the members of the domain, and perhaps even before he
has had any, but which (3) may, nonetheless, entail the strongest
feelings about them, (4) shape his subsequent encounters with
them, and that (5) are not at all easily shaken or changed, even
when these encounters produce experiences discrepant with the
assumptions. In short, they are often resistant to “evidence." To
say, then, that sociology is shaped by the background assumptions
of its practitioners is only to say that they have a human vulner-
ability to prejudice. These prejudices, however, may be even more
difficult to escape than racial prejudice, insofar as they do not
manifestly impair the interests of special groups whose struggle
against the prejudice may heighten public awareness of it.

It would seem to be one implication of Charles Osgood’s work
on the “semantic differential” that certain kinds of background
assumptions will be made universally, about all linguistically con-
stituted domains. 3 For example, they may always be judged in
terms of their weakness or strength, their activity or passivity; most
importantly, they will always be defined in terms of their “good-
ness” or “badness.” In short, if linguistic categories constitute do-
mains and thus define reality,, they inescapably entail an imputa-
tion about moral worth and value. As in the realm of physics,
where there is no quality without some quantity, so in the social
realm, there is no reality without value; the real and the ideal are
different dimensions, but they are simultaneously constituted by
and inseparably fused in the linguistic categories that constitute
social domains.

In brief, to understand the character of Academic Sociology we
have to understand the background assumptions, the world hy-
potheses and domain assumptions, with which it works. These may
be inferred from the stipulated social theories with which it oper-
ates. The theories thus constitute part but not all of the data by
which we can glean a theorist’s background assumptions. I say
“part but not all” of the data, because theorists leave other trace-
marks than their formal publications; they write letters, have con-

24 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

versations, give informal lectures, and take political positions. In
short, they do not merely write technical articles; they live in all
the revealing ways that other men do. Indeed, they may even sub-
mit to interviews.

Background assumptions provide the inherited intellectual “cap-
ital” with which a theorist is endowed long before he becomes a
theorist, and which he later invests in his intellectual and scientific
roles, fusing it to his technical training. Sub-theoretical in charac-
ter, background assumptions endow the stipulated theory with its
appeal, its power, its reach; they establish its maneuver ground
for technical development. At some point in this development,
however, old background assumptions may come to operate in new
conditions, scientifically or socially unsuitable, and thus create an
uncomfortable dissonance for the theorist. They then become
boundaries which confine and inhibit the theory’s further develop-
ment. When this occurs, it is no small technical rectification that
is required; rather, a basic intellectual shift impends. Again, a new
generation may arise with new background assumptions, ones that
are not resonated congenially by theories based on older assump-
tions which the young generation feels to be wrong or absurd. It is
then we can say that a theory, or the discipline based on it, verges
on crisis.

The most basic changes in any science commonly derive not so
much from the invention of new research techniques but rather
from new ways of looking at data that may have long existed. In-
deed, they may neither refer to nor be occasioned by “data,” old or
new. The most basic changes are in theory and in conceptual
schemes, especially those that embody new background assump-
tions. They are thus changes in the way the world is seen, in what
is believed to be real and valuable. To understand the impending
crisis in sociology, therefore, it is necessary to understand its dom-
inant intellectual schemes and theories; it is necessary to see the
ways in which their background assumptions, by no means new,
are being brought to a painful dissonance by new developments in
the larger society.

It is an essential element in my theory about sociolog}' that its
articulated theories in part derive from, rest on, and are sustained
by the usually tacit assumptions that theorists make about the
domains with which they concern themselves. Articulate social
theory, I shall hold, is in part an extrusion from, and develops in
interaction with, the theorist’s tacit domain assumptions. Believ-
ing this to be the case for other theorists, I shall be obliged at
various points in the discussion to present my own domain assump-
tions, for reasons of candor as well as of consistency.

It is of the essence of domain assumptions that they are intel-

Sociology and Sub-Sociologtj 35

lectually consequential, which is to say, they are theory-shaping,
not because they rest on evidence nor even because they are prov-
able; a social domain defined as real is real in its consequences for
theory-making. In setting out one’s domain assumptions, however,
there is considerable danger that one will dissemble precisely be-
cause one wants to be “reasonable.” One does not want to acknowl-
edge as one’s own an assumption for which one can give no “good”
reason, and there is a great disposition to adorn or disguise a do-
main assumption in a reasonable argument, even if that is not the
reason one holds it. And it is an almost overpowering temptation,
particularly for those sociologists who need to think of themselves
as scientists, to present their domain assumptions as if they were
empirically substantiated "facts.”

Yet the presentation of one’s domain assumptions may provide
an occasion when the theorist may glimpse whether or not he has
a right to believe in them. The point, then, at which the theorist
sees the importance of and attempts to present his domain assump-
tions is an ambiguous moment. It has the contradictory potential
of increasing his self-awareness or his self-deception, of disclosing
or dissembling, of activating growth-inducing forces or foreclosing
the possibilities of basic intellectual development. It may be a
fruitful but always is a dangerous moment in the lives of theorists.

Two things are needed to grasp it productively. First, the
theorist must recognize that what is at issue here is not only what
is in the world but also what is in himself; he must have a capacity
to hear his own voice, not simply those of others. Second, he must
have the courage of his convictions, or at least courage enough to
acknowledge his beliefs as his, whether or not legitimated by reason
and evidence. Unless he delivers his domain assumptions from the
dim realm of subsidiary awareness into the clearer realm of focal
awareness, where they can be held firmly in view, they can never
be brought before the bar of reason or submitted to the test of e%i-
dence. The theorist lacking in such insight and courage is in the
wTong business.

The important thing in setting forth one’s domain assumptions
is to have the insight to see what one believes and the courage to
say what one secs. And since insight and .courage are scarce moral
resources, the important thing in reading someone else’s account
of his domain assumptions is to be continually aware that at some
point you are going to be deceived.

3 6

Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

THE IMPORTANCE OF DOMAIN ASSUMPTIONS:
A RESEARCH NOTE

That domain assumptions are in fact consequential for, or at least
very importantly related to, a great variety of other professional
and theoretical beliefs held by sociologists, despite there being.no
sense in which they rest on “evidence,” may be gleaned from the
national opinion survey of American sociologists conducted by
Timothy Sprehe and me in 1964. 4 A very large number of questions
concerning a great variety of areas were answered by the more
than 3,400 sociologists who replied. Among the areas explored were
the sociologists’ conceptions of their role in society, their attitudes
toward sociology as a “value-free” discipline, their attitudes toward
specific theories, research techniques and methodologies, and their
attitudes toward professionalization and professionalism. We also
asked a variety of questions designed to explore sociologists’ domain
assumptions. For example, we asked them whether they believe
men are rational, whether social problems are self-correcting or
require planned intervention, whether human behavior is unpre-
dictable, whether the ultimate reality of group life was located in
unity or diversity, whether changing people is more important than
understanding them, whether human behavior is more or less com-
plex than it seems. Most of these questions were unqualified, and
aimed to discern what sociologists attributed to such entire domains
as “human behavior,” “modem society,” “the world,” or “groups.”
Some methodological purists might object that such questions can-
not be answered, or are "meaningless,” or are lacking in specificity.
Basically, however, such an objection either rests on the assump-
tion that sociologists are fundamentally different from other human
beings and do not hold the same kind of vague and “unproven”
beliefs that others do, or else it wishes to blur the issue, which is
an empirical one, with the irrelevant notion that sociologists should
not have such beliefs. But, if our approach needs any defense, it
was one of the elemental findings of our research that sociologists
seem to have no more difficulty than anyone else in answering such
broad questions, and, like other men, they do indeed hold the kind
of beliefs that I have characterized as domain assumptions.

More than that, however, our research also indicated that do-
main assumptions are a rather important type of belief when
compared to the other types of belief by a factor analysis of the
questionnaire data. This factor analysis (an orthogonal, “Varimax”

38 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

elicited by a great many things other than domain assumptions, for
instance, individual persons or concrete situations.

Furthermore, people may have sentiments that are not conven-
tionally called for by the domain assumptions that they have
learned, but they are not for that reason any the less powerful and
body-gripping. There may, in brief, be various forms of dissonance
between the existential and normative beliefs that people learn in
connection with domain-constituting categories, and the sentiments
that they feel toward members of that category. Thus, for instance,
a White woman may feel sexually aroused and attracted to a Black
man, even though she also believes that Blacks are “dirty” and
“disgusting.” A man may feel pessimistic and despairing, resigned
and quiescent, even though he also believes that men are good and
that society progresses, simply because he himself is ill or aging.
Correspondingly, a man may, when young, feel optimistic and en-
ergetically activistic, even though he may believe that the world
is on a collision course with disaster and that there is litde that
can be done about it.

I am, of course, not suggesting that young men are invariably
more optimistic than old ones, but what I am intimating, using
age only as an example, is that people may feel things at variance
with their domain assumptions, with their existential beliefs or
normative values; feelings emerge from people’s experience with
the world, during which they often come to need and learn things
that are somewhat different from what they are supposed to need
or were deliberately taught to learn. If Freud and other psycholo-
gists are right about the Oedipal Complex, many men in Western
societies feel hostility toward their fathers even though they have
never been taught to do so, and in fact have been taught to love
and honor them. In short, men may have feelings at variance with
those of their culturally prescribed “languages” that is, with the
domain assumptions conventional to their group of society. Such
sentiments may be idiosyncratic to an individual and derive from
his unique experience, or they may be shared by large numbers and
derive from an experience common to them, even if not culturally
prescribed for them. Thus, at least since about the early nineteenth
century, many young people in Western countries seem to be sub-
jected to a common experience that induces them to be somewhat
more anti-authoritarian, rebellious, or critical of the political and
cultural status quo than were their elders.

The prescribed domain assumptions, then, are one thing; the
sentiments men have may be quite another. When they diverge,
when the things men feel are at variance with their domain as-
sumptions, there is a dissonance or tension between the two levels.
Sometimes this is dealt with simply by giving ritualistic “lip service”

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 39

to the domain assumptions required and taught in the culture;
sometimes men may openly rebel against them, adopting or seeking
new domain assumptions more consonant with the feelings they
actually have. But there is likely to be an intrinsic difficulty in such
an open and active rebellion : first, unless there are already alterna-
tives formulated, men may find it easier to live with the old un-
comfortable assumptions than with none at all; second, men often
experience their own deviant feelings as “wrong” and as perilous
to their own security, and consequently may conceal their unpre-
scribed feelings even from themselves; third, as a consequence of
this, they may not openly communicate their deviant feelings to
others who might share and therefore encourage and support them.

* In consequence then, when a gap opens between the sentiments
men feel and the domain assumptions they have been taught, their
most immediate response may be to suppress or privatize the ex-
perienced dissonance. They may allow the tension to fester; or they
may begin a kind of sporadic, cultural, guerrilla warfare against
the prevailing domain assumptions, in which their dissatisfaction
is intermittently expressed in squeaks of black humor or by an
inertial apathy. This situation, very much like the attitude of some
young radicals today toward academic sociology, begins to change
importantly when domain categories and assumptions emerge that
are more consonant with what people feel. When resistance to
established assumptions lacks alternatives, it may at first be mani-
fested socially among those who, while lacking a new language, do
nonetheless recognize their common possession of deviant senti-
ments, and therefore may enter into informal solidarities with one
another against those who they commonly feel share other senti-
ments. The current “generation gap” seems a case in point. When,
however, the new sentiments begin to find or create their own
appropriate language, the possibilities of larger solidarities and of
rational public discussion are extended.

It is in part because social theories are shaped by and express
domain assumptions that they are also sentiment-relevant: reac-
tions to social theories involve the sentiments of the men who read
and write them. Whether a theory is accepted or rejected, whether
it undergoes change or remains essentially unchanged, is not
simply a cerebral decision; it is in some part contingent upon the
gratifications or tensions that it generates by dint of its relation to
the sentiments of those involved. Social theories may be sentiment-
relevant in various ways and to varying degrees may inhibit or
arouse the expression of certain sentiments. As a limiting case, the
degree to which they impinge upon sentiments may be so small
that, for all practical purposes, they may be said to be “neutral” in
their sentiment-relevance. Yet even this last case is consequential

40 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

for reactions to the theory, for the sentiment-neutral theory may
simply be eliciting apathetic or disinterested responses, the feeling
that the theory is somehow “irrelevant," and thus induce avoidance
of, if not active opposition to, it. Moreover, reactions to a social
theory may also depend upon the kinds of sentiments that are
aroused directly or by association. The activation of particular
sentiments may at some times and for some people be enjoyable,
or it may be discomfiting and painful.

Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy, for example, stressing, as it
does, the inevitable proliferation of bureaucratic forms in the in-
creasingly large and complex modem social organizations, tends
to elicit and resonate sentiments of pessimism concerning the pos-
sibilities of large-scale social change that could successfully remedy"
human alienation. Those committed to efforts at such change will
experience such sentiments as dissonant and may therefore react
critically to the theory, attempting to change it in ways that strip
it of such consequences, or they may reject it altogether. Con-
versely, those who never had — or who once had but then relin-
quished — aspirations for social change, or whose inclination is to
seek limited intra-system reforms, may for their part not experience
the Weberian theory as inducing an unpleasant pessimism.

In one case, then, a theory may have a coherence-inducing or
integrating effect, while in another it may have a tension- or
conflict-inducing effect; each has different consequences for the
individual's ability to pursue certain courses of action in the world
and has different implications for different lines of political con-
duct. It is thus through its sentiment-relevance as well as through
its domain assumptions that a social theory takes on political
meanings and implications quite apart from whether these were
knowingly intended or recognized either by those who formulated
or those who accepted it. In the example mentioned above, con-
cerning Weber's theory of bureaucracy, it is commonly understood
that the theory has strongly antisocialist implications, for it im-
plies that change toward socialism will not prevent bureaucratiza-
tion and alienation.

PERSONAL REALITY AND SOCIAL THEORY

If every social theory is thus a tacit theory of politics, every theory
is also a personal theory, inevitably expressing, coping, and infused
with the personal experience of the individuals who author it.

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 41

Every social theory has both political and personal relevance,
which, according to the technical canons of social theory, it is not
supposed to have. Consequently, both the .man and his politics are
commonly screened out in what is deemed the proper presentation
of presumably “autonomous” social theory.

Yet, however disguised, an appreciable part of any sociological
enterprise devolves from the sociologist's effort to explore, to ob-
jectify, and to universalize some of his own most deeply personal
experiences. Much of any man’s effort to know the social world
around him is prompted by an effort, more or less disguised or
deliberate, to know things that are personally important to him;
which is to say, he aims at knowing himself and the experiences
he has had in his social world (his relationship to it), and at
changing this relationship in some manner. Like it or not, and
know it or not, in confronting the social world the theorist is also
confronting himself. While this has no bearing on the validity'
of the resultant theory, it does bear on another legitimate interest:
the sources, the motives, and the aims of the sociological quest.

Whatever their other differences, all sociologists seek to study
something in the social world that they take to be real; and, what-
ever their philosophy of science, they seek to explain it in terms of
something that they feel to be real. Like other men. sociologists
impute reality to certain things in their social world. This is to say.
they believe, sometimes with focal and sometimes only with sub-
sidiary awareness, that certain things are truly attributable to the
social world. In important part, their conception of what is “real”
derives from the domain assumptions they have learned in their
culture. These culturally standardized assumptions are, however,
differentiated by personal experience in different parts of the social
structure. Individually accented by particular sentiment-generating
experiences, the common domain assumptions in time assume per-
sonal arrangements; they become part of a man’s personal reality.

For simplicity’s sake, I suggest that there are two kinds of
“reality” with which sociologists must come to terms. One consists
of “role realities,” the things thev leam as sociologists; these in-
dude what they believe to be the “facts” yielded by previous re-
searches, whether conducted by themselves or others. The “facts,”
of course, entail imputations made by men about the world. To
assign factuality to some imputation about the world is also to
express a personal conviction about its truth, as well as about the
propriety of the process by which it was made. To believe an im-
putation to be “factual” is to assign a high value to it. setting it
above such things as “opinions" or “prejudices.”

Inevitably, to assign factuality to an imputation is to make it an
anchor point in the seifs relation to the world, to make it or claim

42 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

it should be central to the self. To assign factuality to an imputa-
ion is to invoke an obligation and duty upon the self: one must
“take the facts into account” under certain conditions. There is the
further obligation to inspect severely and to examine critically (in
short to defend against) attacks on one’s “factual” beliefs; a denial
of beliefs previously thought to be factual is thus a self-mobilizing
“challenge.” Within scientific communities, therefore, men engage
in committed personal efforts — through contest, conflict, struggle,
and negotiation — to establish and maintain the facts. The facts are
not automatically produced by the impersonal machinery of re-
search. To assign factuality to a belief is a self -involving commit-
ment; the person makes a claim upon the credence of another, or
himself lends credence to the claim of another. In these and other
ways, the factual becomes part of the sociologist’s personal reality.

In particular those imputations that a sociologist makes about
the factuality of beliefs based on research tend to become aspects
of his reality, part of his focal awareness as a sociologist. Deemed
relevant to his work as a sociologist and derived in accordance with
methodological decorum, the sociologist commonly feels that he
may with propriety publicly endorse such beliefs. Indeed, these
must explicitly be attended to by him under certain conditions. In
short, he must not ignore them, and he need not conceal his belief
in them.

A second order of conceptions about reality held by sociologists
consists of the “personally real.” These are imputations about “re-
alities” in the social world that sociologists make, not because of
“evidence” or “research,” but simply because of what they have seen,
heard, been told, or read. While these beliefs differ from “facts”
systematically gathered and scientifically evaluated, the sociologist
nonetheless experiences them as no less real — and it is well for
his sanity that he does. Still, while these are every bit as real to
him as facts garnered through research, if not more so, the sociolo-
gist qua sociologist is not supposed to credit or attend to them in
the same way that he treats “facts”; indeed, he may feel obliged as
a sociologist to subject them to systematic doubt. Imputations
about the world that are part of the sociologist’s personal reality
may therefore sink into his subsidiary awareness rather than re-
maining consciously available to him, when he acts as a conform-
ing sociologist. But this, of course, is very far from saying that they
thereby cease to have consequences for his work as a sociologist
or social theorist. In practice, the sociologist’s role realities and his
personal realities interpenetrate and mutually influence one an-
other.

During the 1940’s and 1950’s, largely under the influence of
Talcott Parsons, many sociologists stressed the importance of

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 43

theory in structuring research. Starting from the commonplace that
sociologists did not view all parts of the social world as equally
important, but rather focused their attention upon it selectively,
they concluded that this perceptual organization was largely the
result of the “theories,” tacit or explicit, which were held. “Facts”
were thus seen as the product of an effort to pursue the inferences
of theories and, indeed, as being constituted by the conceptual
schemes embedded in the theories. Facts were seen, at least pri-
marily, as interacting with theories, confirming or disproving them,
and thus as cumulatively shaping theoretical development; per-
ceptual selectivity, and hence the focus of research, was largely
accounted for in terms of the sociologist’s theoretical commitment.

This emphasis tended to deprecate the earlier tradition of
methodological empiricism, which had stressed the primary value
of data and research. If the empiricists had stressed that sociolo-
gists are or should be guided by the facts yielded by properly con-
ducted research, theory-stressing sociologists tended to reply that
sociologists are or should be guided by articulate, explicit, and
hence testable theory. From the standpoint presented here, how-
ever, both seem to have been at least partially mistaken.

Those who emphasized theory tended unduly to deprecate the
self-implicating, perception-anchoring, and stabilizing role of “facts”
(as distinct from their validity-testing function); the empiricists
tended to miss the importance of previously held theoretical as-
sumptions. Both, in addition, made a common error in limiting
themselves to only one order of the imputably real, namely, the
“factual.” What both missed is that scientific factuality is only a
special case of a larger set of beliefs, those imputing reality; both
failed to see that whether an aspect of “role reality” or “personal
reality,” the imputably real has a special force in structuring the
perception of the sociologist and shaping his subsequent theorizing
and research. The theorists in particular failed to see the impor-
tance of the sub-theoretical level, including the “personally real,”
as consequential for theory and research. A situation defined as
real is real in its consequences, for sociologists as for other men.

Whether part of his role reality or his personal reality, things to
which the sociologist imputes reality play a role in his work in
several ways. They may be elements that he is concerned to ex-
plain, in short, as “dependent variables” or effects; they may be part
of his explanatory effort, serving as “independent variables” or
possible “causes”; or, again, they may be used as explicit models or
tacit paradigms that he employs to clarify the nature of what he
wants to explain or the factors that explain it.

To amplify the latter point: the imputably real enters impor-
tantly into theory construction by being regarded as possessed of

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 45

Sociologists, of course, arc familiar with these dangers, at least
cn principc. and they seek to use systematic sampling as a way of
obviating them. Nonetheless, systematic sampling cannot fully
avoid the problem, for it provides a basis for testing a theory only
subsequent to its formulation. Disciplined research entails the use
of a systematic sample in order to test inferences from a theory,
but. in the nature of the ease, the theory must be formulated prior
to the sample. Indeed, the more the sociologist stresses the impor-
tance of articulate theory, the more this is likely to be the ease.
The theory will therefore tend to devolve around, and consequently
be shaped bv. the limited facts and personal realities available to
the theorist, and in particular by those imputed realities that he
treats as paradigms.

Systematic sampling serves primarily as a restraint on unjusti-
fied generalization from "facts”; but it docs not similarly restrain
the influence of “personal realities.” Since the latter commonly re-
mains only at the fringes of subsidiary awareness, being deemed
scientifically irrelevant, it is often (and mistakenly) assumed that
it is scientifically inconsequential. In point of fact, the personally
real and problematic often enough becomes the starting point for
systematic inquiry— and, indeed, there is no scientific reason this
should not be so.

What is personally real to men is real, frequently though not
always, primarily because it is not unique to them — in the sense of
idiosyncratic to, or uniquely different for, them — but rather is
socially and collectively true. Since the sense of the reality of things
often depends on mutual agreement or consensual validation, col-
lectively held notions of reality are among the most firmly consti-
tuted components of an individual's personal reality. Yet the per-
sonally real does not entirely consist of or derive from collective
definitions of social reality. It may also emerge from recurrent
personal experience, whether unique to the person or shared with
a few others. What becomes personally real to one individual, then,
need not be personally real to others. But whether derived from
collective definitions or from recurrent personal experiences, a man
believes that some things are real; and these imputed realities are
of special importance to the kinds of theories that he formulates,
even if he happens to be a sociologist.

Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF SOCIAL THEORY

From this perspective all social theory is immersed in a sub-
theoretical level of domain assumptions and sentiments which both
liberate and constrain it. This sub-theoretical level is shaped by
and shared with the larger culture and society, at least to some
extent, as well as being individually organized, accented, differenti-
ated, and changed by personal experience in the world. I call this
sub-theoretical level the “infrastructure” of theory.

This infrastructure is important not because it is the ultimate
determinant of the character of social theory, but because it is part
of the most immediate, local surround from which the theory-work
eventuates in theory-performances and theory-products. Theory-
work is surely linked to, even if not solely determined by, the
character of the theorist doing it. This infrastructure can never
really be left behind, even in the most isolated and lonely moments
of theory-work, when a man finally puts pen to paper in a room
where there is no one but himself. The world is, of course, there in
the room with him, in him; he has not escaped it. But it is not the
world, not the society and the culture that is there with him, but
his limited version and partial experience of it.

However individual a work of theory is, nonetheless, some (and
perhaps much) of its individuality is conventional in character.
The individuality of theory-work is, in part, a socially sanctioned
illusion. For there are the assistants who have helped the theorist
do his research and writing; there are the colleagues and the
students, the friends and the lovers, on whom he has informally
“tested” his ideas; there are those from whom he has learned and
taken and those whom he opposes. All theory is not merely in-
fluenced but actually produced by a group. Behind each theory-
product is not only the author whose name appears upon the work,
but an entire shadow group for whom, we might say, the “author”
is the emblem; in a way, the author’s name serves as the name of
an intellectual team.

Yet the “author” is not merely the puppet of these group forces,
because to some extent he selects his team, recruits members to
and eliminates them from his theory-working group, responds selec-
tively to the things they suggest and the criticisms they make, ac-
cepting some and ignoring others, attending to some more closely
than others. Thus, while authorship is always in some measure
conventional, it is also in some measure the expression of the real
activities and initiatives of an individual theorist whose “infra-

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 47

structure” helps shape both the ideas and the shadow group whose
tacit collaboration eventuates in theoretical performances.

A concern with sub-theory or the infrastructure of theory is not
the expression of an inclination to psychologize theory and is cer-
tainly not a form of psychological reductionism. It is, rather, the
outcome of a concern for empirical realism, an effort to come close
to the human systems to which any theoretical work is most visibly
and intimately linked. It is an effort that is peculiarly necessary
for those working within a sociological tradition that tends to ob-
scure and to cast doubt upon the importance and reality of persons,
and to view them as the creatures of grander social structures.
For those, such as myself, who have lived within a sociological
tradition, the importance of the larger social structures and his-
torical processes is not in doubt. What is intellectually in question,
when the significance of theoretical infrastructure is raised, is the
analytic means by which we may move between persons and social
structures, between society and the local, more narrowly bounded
environments from which social theory discemibly derives. My own
view is that any sociological explanation or generalization implies
(at least tacitly) certain psychological assumptions; correspond-
ingly, any psychological generalization tacitly implies certain socio-
logical conditions. In directing attention to the importance of the
theoretical infrastructure, I have sought not to psychologize social
theory and remove it from the larger social system, but rather to
specify the analytic means by which I hope to link it more firmly
with the larger social world.

THEORETICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND IDEOLOGY

Rooted in a limited personal reality, resonating some sentiments but
not others, and embedded in certain domain assumptions, every
social theory facilitates the pursuit of some but not of all courses
of action, and thus encourages us to change or to accept the world
as it is, to say yea or nay to it. In a way, every theory is a discreet
obituary or celebration for some social system.

The sentiments resonated by a social theory provide an immedi-
ate but privatized mood, an experience that inhibits or fosters
anticipated courses of public and political conduct, and thus may
exacerbate or resolve internal uncertainties or conflicts about the
possibilities of successful outcomes. Similarly, domain assumptions

48 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

entail beliefs about what is real in the world and thus have im-
plications about what it is possible to do, to change in the world;
the values they entail indicate what courses of action are desirable
and thus shape conduct. In this sense, every theory and every
theorist ideologizes social reality.

The ideologizing of sociology is not an archaism manifested only
by long-dead “founding fathers” but absent from more truly
modem sociologists. Indeed, it is fully manifest in the school of
thought that has been most insistent on the importance of profes-
sionalizing sociology and of maintaining its intellectual autonomy,
namely, that developed by Talcott Parsons. This may be noted even
in a recent collection of essays on American Sociology, edited by
Parsons in igeS/' The dominant mood of this volume, published in
the midst of the ongoing war in Vietnam and written during a
period when hostilities between the Rlack and White communities
in American cities had reached the point of recurrent summer
violence and rioting, was. despite this, one of self-congratulatory
celebration.

One convenience of this volume is that, being intended for pop-
ular consumption — indeed, originally prepared for the Voice of
America broadcasts — its essays are swathed in fewer layers of
gauzy jargon. One can more readily see the domain assumptions on
which they rest, the sentiments that they resonate, the politics they
imply. S. M. Lipsct, in his essay, for example, ’em arks that “basic
structural changes while maintaining traditional legitimacy in
political institutions would appear to be the best way to avoid
political tensions."''' Rut is the avoidance of political tensions always
best, for whom? If I can fathom Mr. Upset’s meaning here, he is
saying that political stability would be achieved if efforts at social
change prudently stopped short of changing established ways of
allocating and justifying power. I doubt this, for it seems to me that
the clinging to established legitimations of political power is one
of the ways in which elites seek to block all other “basic structural
changes." Moreover, what of countries where political legitimacy
itself is based on revolution? One also wonders whether Upset
would apply his assumptions about continuity to Soviet Russia and
tell Soviet liberals that they too should adapt their reform impulses
to their nation's traditional mode of legitimating political power,
thus maintaining its autocratic political traditions. Politically, Lip-
set’s argument is the classical conservative brief against abrupt
tensionful change which might disrupt legitimacy, continuity, and
gradualism.

The self-congratulatory tone of this volume is raised to patriotic
pitch when Mr. Lipsct argues that exceptional grace was bestowed
on American society when George Washington, for reasons unex-

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 49

plained, refused the crown. This triumphal theme is carried for-
ward by Albert Cohen, who implicitly answers those who call
America a sick society by maintaining that, to the contrary, “the
United States is a dynamic, growing, prosperous, more or less
democratic society.” 7 The celebration continues: Thomas Pettigrew
recounts the story of Black progress in the United States, where, he
holds, “one out of every three Negro Americans today can be
sociologically classified ... as middle class.” 8 He reassures us that
racial violence today, far from being a symptom of societal malaise,
is, to the contrary, proof of the “rapid social progress taking place.” 9
“Rapid” from whose standpoint?

Reinhard Bendix also assures us that, in modem society, the
words “ruler” and “ruled” no longer have “clear meaning.” 10 Pre-
sumably this is so, because the people now exercise "control
through periodic elections . . . [and] the fact that every adult has
the vote is a token of the regard in which he is held as an individual
and a citizen.” 11 The franchise, Bendix tells us, has been “extended.”
One wonders if that is how the matter would be put by those who
were arrested, beaten, and killed in the struggle during the 1960’s
to enfranchise Blacks in the American South: would they see what
had happened as an “extension” of the franchise?

In all this, a very selective, one-sided picture of American society
is made persuasive by a number of techniques. One is to call the
partly-filled glass of water half-filled, rather than half-empty; for
example, American Blacks are described as one-third middle class,
rather than as two-thirds miserable. There is also the strategy of
the Great Omission. In this volume there is scarcely anything about
war, not an echo of the new revisionist historiography; indeed, the
word "imperialism" docs not appear in the book’s index, and there
is nothing about the relation between democracy, affluence, and
war. Furthermore, we may note how myths are woven into the
total view of social reality, deeply but invisibly, by the entire
structure of language and conceptualization. When, for instance,
the bloody struggle to register Blacks in the South is rendered as
the mechanical "extension” of the franchise, a much larger view of
social change and of men is implicitly communicated.

METHODOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY

Domain assumptions concerning man and society are built not
only into substantive social theory but into methodology itself.
Charles Tilly’s essay on urbanization, in Parsons’ volume, presents

Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

an interesting case of the latter, revealing the manner in which
research methods predicate domain assumptions and how, at the
same time, these methods generate dispositions of political rele-
vance. “No country,” complains Tilly, “has a social accounting
system allowing the quick, reliable detection of changes in organ-
izational membership, kinship organization, religious adherence,
or even occupational mobility.” 1 - From Tilly’s standpoint as a
research-oriented sociologist, this is a bad thing. Yet what kind of
country would it be that would have such a relentless, “quick,
reliable” all-embracing system of information about its population?
Surely it would be a nation in which the potentialities (at least) for
the most complete totalitarianism were at hand. Undoubtedly Tilly
W'ould reject such a society as quickly as I. Yet he and many other
sociologists fail to see that the conventional methodologies of social
research often premise and foster a deep-going authoritarianism, a
readiness to lie to and manipulate people: they betray a bureau-
cratic numbness.

As Chris Argyris has put it (but not in Parsons’ American So-
ciology ), conformity to “rigorous research criteria would create a
world for the subject in which his behavior is defined, controlled,
evaluated, manipulated, and reported to a degree that is com-
parable to the behavior of workers in the most mechanized
assembly-line conditions.” Stated otherwise, information-gathering
systems or research methods always premise the existence and
use of some system of social control. It is not only that the informa-
tion they yield may be used by systems of social control, but that
they themselves are systems of control.

Every research method makes some assumptions about how
information may be secured from people and what may be done
with people, or to them, in order to secure it; this, in turn, rests
on certain domain assumptions concerning who and what people
are. To the degree that the social sciences are modelled on the
physical sciences, they entail the domain assumption that people
are “things” which may be treated and controlled in much the same
manner that other sciences control their non-human materials:
people are “subjects” which may be subjected to the control of the
experimenter for purposes they need not understand or even con-
sent to. Such social science will thoughtlessly drift into buying in-
crements of information at the cost of human autonomy and
dignity.

When viewed from one standpoint, “methodology” seems a
purely technical concern devoid of ideology; presumably it deals
only with methods of extracting reliable information from the
world, collecting data, constructing questionnaires, sampling, and
analyzing returns. Yet it is always a good deal more than that, for it

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 51

is commonly infused with ideologically resonant assumptions about
what the social world is, who the sociologist is, and what the nature
of the relation between them is.

THE AUTONOMY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE
AS DOMAIN ASSUMPTION

It is not only in its basic methodological conceptions, however, that
sociology is embedded in domain assumptions having ideological
resonance, but also in its most fundamental conceptions of what its
subject matter is and what the characteristics are of the distinctive
domains it studies. For example, in Peter Blau’s contribution to
Parsons’ American Sociology, there is the conventional but unex-
amined assumption that, “once firmly organized,” an organization
tends to assume an identity of its own which makes it independent
of the people who have founded it or of those who constitute its
membership.” 13 Although flatly asserted as fact, Blau’s statement
is, being a characterization of all formal organizations, clearly a
domain assumption. The evidence that would allow all formal
organizations to be thus characterized is trivial in comparison to
the scope of the generalization. But there is nothing novel in this;
it is the common way of men with domain assumptions.

Whether Blau’s statement is actually a fact or only a domain
assumption parading as one, there is still a consequential choice
of how to view it. It makes a substantial difference whether one
views the autonomy or alienation of social structures from people
as a normal condition to be accepted or as an endemic and recur-
rent disease to be opposed. It is inherent in the very occupational
ideology of many modem sociologists, faced as they are with the
professional task of distinguishing their own from competing aca-
demic disciplines, not only to stress the potency and autonomy
of social structures — and therefore the dependence of persons —
but also to accept this as normal, rather than asking; Under what
conditions does it occur? Are there not differences in the degree to
which social structures get out of hand and five independently of
their members? What accounts for these differences?

In short, then, from the substantive domain assumption that
human beings are the raw materials of independent social struc-
tures, to the methodological domain assumption that men may be
treated and studied like other “things,” there is a repressive techno-

Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

cratic current in sociology and the other social sciences, as well as
in the general society. It is a current that has great social impor-
tance because it congenially resonates the sentiments of any
modern elite in bureaucratized societies who view social problems
in terms of technological paradigms, as a kind of engineering task.

The domain assumptions of sociological analysis are embedded
in — both expressed and concealed by — its most central program-
matic concepts, its most elemental vision of “society” and “cul-
ture.” The focal implications of these concepts stress the manner
in which men are shaped and influenced by their groups and group
heritage. Yet since the social sciences emerged in the secularized
world of the “self-made” bourgeoisie that surfaced after the French
Revolution in nineteenth-century Europe, these concepts also tacitly
imply that man makes his own societies and cultures. They imply
the potency of man. But this vision of the potency of man, in
contrast to that of society and culture, tends to be confined to the
merely subsidiary attention of Academic Sociology rather than to
its focal concerns.

Academic Sociology's emphasis on the potency of society and
the subordination of men to it is itself an historical product that
contains an historical truth. The modern concepts of society and of
culture arose in a social world that, following the French Revolu-
tion, men could believe they themselves had made. They could see
that it w r as through their struggles that kings had been overthrown
and an ancient religion disestablished. Yet, at the same time men
could also see that this was a world out of control, not amenable to
men’s designs. It w r as therefore a grotesque, contradictory w r orld: a
w'orld made by men but, despite this, not their world.

No thinker better grasped this paradoxical character of tire new
social world than Rousseau. It was central to his conception that
man W'as corrupted by the very advance of the arts and sciences,
that he had lost something vital in the very midst of his highest
achievements. This paradoxical vision also underlies his conception
of man as born free but now' living everywhere in chains: man
creates society through a willing contract but must then subject
himself to his own creation.

Culture and society thus emerged as ambiguous conceptions, as
being man’s owm creations but also having lives and histories of
their owm. It is precisely this ambiguity to which the central con-
ceptions of sociological analysis, "culture” and "society," give con-
tinued expression. Both culture and society are seen, in sociological
analysis, as having a life apart from the men who create, embody,
and enact them. The concepts of culture and society tacitly predi-
cate that men have created a social world from which they have
been alienated. The germinal concepts of the social sciences, then,

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 53

are imprinted with the birth trauma of a social world from which
men saw themselves alienated from their own creations; in which
men felt themselves to be at once newly potent and tragically im-
potent. The emerging academic social sciences thus commonly
came to conceive of society and culture as autonomous things:
things that are independent and exist for themselves. Society and
culture were then amenable to being viewed like any other “natural”
phenomena, as having laws of their own that operated quite apart
from the intentions and plans of men, while die disciplines that
studied them could be viewed as natural sciences like any other.
Method, then, follows domain assumption. In other words, sociology
emerged as a “natural” science when certain domain assumptions
and sentiments became prevalent: when men felt alienated from a
society that they thought they had made but could not control.
Whereas European men had once expressed their estrangement
from themselves in terms of traditional religion and metaphysics,
they now began to do so through academic social science, and
scientism became, in this way, a modern substitute for a decaying
traditional religion.

The concepts of society and culture, which are at the very
foundation of the academic social sciences, are in part based upon
a reaction to an historical defeat: man's failure to possess the
social world that he created. To that extent, the academic social
sciences are the social sciences of an alienated age and alienated
man. From this standpoint the possibility of "objectivity” in, and
the call to “objectivity” by, the academic social sciences has a
rather different meaning than that conventionally assigned. The
"objectivity" of the social sciences is not the expression of a dis-
passionate and detached view of the social world; it is, rather, an
ambivalent effort to accommodate to alienation and to express a
muted resentment of it.

In one part, then, the dominant expressions of the academic
social sciences embody an accommodation to the alienation of men
in contemporary society, rather than a determined effort to tran-
scend it. The core concepts of society and culture, as held by the
social sciences, entail the view that their autonomy and uncon-
trollability are a normal and natural condition, rather than intrin-
sically a kind of pathology. It is this assumption that is at the heart
of the repressive component of sociology.

At the same time, however, the social sciences’ accommodation
to alienation is an ambivalent and resentful one. It is in this muted
resentment that there is the suppressed liberative potential of
sociolog)’. And it is this total conception of man — the dominant
focal view of him as the controlled product of society and culture,
combined with the subsidiary conception of man as the maker of

54 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

society and culture — that shapes the unique contradiction distinc-
tive of sociology.

It is not simply that one or another “school” of sociology em-
bodies these contradictory domain assumptions about men and
society, but that these dwell in the basic charter of Academic So-
ciology as a discipline. These assumptions resonate certain senti-
ments about the grotesqueness of the social world that began to
emerge during the nineteenth century, and they are rooted in a
contradictory personal reality widely shared by men who, then as
now, felt that they were somehow living in a world that they made
but did not control.

THE CONTRADICTION OF AUTONOMY

When sociologists stress the autonomy of sociology — that it should
(and, therefore, that it can) be pursued entirely in terms of its
own standards, free of the influences of the surrounding society —
they are giving testimony of their loyalty to the rational credo of
their profession. At the same time, however, they are also contra-
dicting themselves as sociologists, for surely the strongest general
assumption of sociology is that men are shaped in countless ways
by the press of their social surround. Looked at with bland inno-
cence, then, the sociologists’ claim to autonomy entails a contra-
diction between the claims of sociology and the claims of reason
and “profession.”

In large measure, this contradiction is hidden, in daily practice,
by sociologists who premise a dualistic reality in which their own
behavior is tacitly held to be different from the behavior of those
they study. It is hidden by employing the focal sociological assump-
tion, that men are shaped by culture and social structure, when
sociologists study others, yet tacitly employing the assumption that
men make their own cultures, when sociologists think about them-
selves. The operating premise of the sociologist claiming autonomy
for his discipline is that he is free from the very social pressures
whose importance he affirms when thinking about other men. In
effect, the sociologist conjugates his basic domain assumptions by
saying: they are bound by society; I am free of it.

The sociologist thus resolves his contradictory assumptions by
splitting them and applying each to different persons or groups:
one for himself and his peers, another for his “subjects.” Implicit

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 55

in such a split is an image of self and other, in which the two are
assumed to be deeply different and thus to be differentially evalu-
ated, the “self’ tacitly viewed as a kind of elite, the “other” as a kind
of mass.

One reason for this split is that the focal sociological assump-
tion about the governing influence of the social surround violates
the sociologist’s own sense of personal reality. He, after all, knows
with direct inner certainty that his own behavior is not socially
determined; but the freedom of the others whom he studies is an
aspect only of their personal reality, not of his own. When he
premises that their behavior is socially determined, the sociologist
is not violating his sense of personal reality, but only theirs.

The methodological dualism by which the sociologist keeps two
sets of books, one for the study of ‘laymen” and another when he
thinks about himself, evidences one of the most profound ways in
which the sociologist’s personal reality shapes his methodological
and theoretical practice. It cannot be stressed too strongly that in
everyday practice the sociologist believes himself capable of making
hundreds of purely rational decisions — the choice of research prob-
lems, sites, question formulations, statistical tests, or sampling
methods. He thinks of these as free technical decisions and of him-
self as acting in autonomous conformity with technical standards,
rather than as a creature molded by social structure and culture. If
he finds he has gone wrong, he thinks of himself as having made a
“mistake.” A “mistake” is an outcome produced not by any social
necessity, but by a corrigible ignorance, a lack of careful thought
or rigorous training, a hasty assessment.

When this inconsistency is called to the sociologist’s attention,
he will acknowledge that his behavior, too, is influenced by social
forces. He will acknowledge, for example, that there is or can be
such a thing as a sociology of knowledge or a sociology of sociology,
in which even the sociologist’s own behavior may be shown to be
socially influenced. But such acknowledgments are usually made
en principe; they are begrudging concessions; they are formally
acknowledged for reasons of consistency; but, not being consistent
with his own feelings of freedom and personal reality, they are not
deeply convincing to the sociologist. In short, they are not really
an operating part of his normal way of thinking about his own
everyday work.

Another way in which this inconsistency is maintained is
through the use of “self-obscuring” methodologies. That is, they
obscure the sociologist from himself. The more prestigious and
“high science” these methodologies are, the less likely it is that the
sociologist will recognize himself as implicated in his research or
will see his findings as having implications about himself. Not being

-q Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

constrained to see his research as having a bearing upon his own
life, he can more readily maintain a different set of assumptions
concerning it.

More specifically, a high science methodology tends to distil the
complexity of social situations into a search for the effects of a few
highly formalized and specially defined “variables,” whose presence
often cannot be gauged by direct inspection but requires special
instruments employed under special conditions. Thus the "vari-
ables” sociologists study often do not exist for laymen; they are not
what laymen see when they look about themselves. High science
methodologies, in effect, create a gap between what the sociologist
as sociologist deals with and what he (like others) confronts as an
ordinary person, experiencing his own existence. Thus even when
he undertakes studies in the sociology of knowledge, exploring, say,
the effects of “class position,” “reference groups,” or “income levels”
on intellectual activities, it is easy for him to feel that he is talking
about someone else, perhaps some other sociologist, not about
himself and his own life.

It is a function of high science methodologies to widen the gap
between what the sociologist is studying and his own personal
reality. Even if one were to assume that this serves to fortify ob-
jectivity and reduce bias, it seems likely that it has been bought at
the price of the dimming of the sociologist’s self-awareness. In
other words, it seems that, at some point, the formula is : the more
rigorous the methodology, the more dimwitted the sociologist; the
more reliable his information about the social world, the less in-
sightful his knowledge about himself.

A concern with the problem of the sociologist’s autonomy clearly
must confront the manifold ways in which the sociologist’s own
social surround affects his work. But if we do not talk about this
in ways enabling the sociologist to recognize this surround as his
own, he will never recognize himself in it. When, however, an
exploration of this problem is informed by a sensitivity to the
importance of the sociologist’s personal reality, it can then lead him
to a view of “society,” not as exotic and external to him, but as
his familiar practice and mundane experience. A concern with his
personal reality leads to an insistence on the unusual importance
't^fjhe most mundane experience for the sociologist. It can lead to
a con&ern with the recognizable texture of his experienced situation
rather tharT'iwith only a few sifted-out, technically defined “var-
iables.” Awareness of textured reality enables “variables” to be seen
as self-experience and allows them to be mobilized for self-under-
standing. The Sociologist is not what he eats; but the sociologist
is what he sees,\does, and wants every day, in all his activities,
morning, noon, arid night, whether as sociologist or not. To under-

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 57

stand him and his personal reality we must see how he lives as well
as how he works.

To take a few singular examples: some sociologists I know
conceive of themselves as gentlemen-professors. They invest con-
siderable energies not merely in their work but in their total style
of life. One I know starts his day by breakfasting in his luxury
apartment, and then, donning his smoking jacket, returns to bed
where he reads or writes in presumably unruffled serenity
until noon, when, as is his unvarying habit, he goes to the uni-
versity. To indicate that matters cannot be simplified, I should
also add that he holds relatively radical views about the value of
peasant revolutions. Still other sociologists I know are gentlemen-
farmers and gentlemen-ranchers. Most live suburban existences;
not a few have summer homes; many do extensive traveling. Most
of the sociologists I know seem to have little interest in “culture”
and are rarely in evidence at galleries, concerts, or plays.

Like other men, sociologists also have sexual lives, and “even
this” may be intellectually consequential. In loyalty tinged with
bitterness, most stick it out to the end with the wives who saw
them through graduate school, while others practice serial polyg-
amy. And a few are hidden homosexuals, often tensely preoccupied
by the dangers of self-disclosure in a “straight” world. My point
is not that this is especially important, but that even this remote
sexual dimension of existence reaches into and is linked with the
sociologist’s world of work. For example, it is my strong but un-
documented impression that when some sociologists change their
work interests, problems, or styles, they also change mistresses
or wives. Again, and while I do not know why it is so, I also
believe that some well-known “schools” of American sociology —
both the people whom they produce and the teachers who produce
them — seem to be dominantly “masculine” and even “studsy” in
group tone; others, however, seem to be more "feminine” in their
personal behavior and in the more aesthetically refined sensibility
that their work manifests.

Some sociologists I know are deeply involved in the stock market,
and have been for quite a while. When they gather together they
will often proudly inform one another of their recent triumphs
or bemoan their losses and pass on current gossip about promising
stocks. Sometimes- they are making money from the very wars that,
as liberals, they denounce. They are also much interested in who
is making how much money as a sociologist, or how much money
it took to lure someone from his old to a new university.

Many sociologists are also much interested in political power and
in being close to men of power. It is not simply the academicians
who were stockpiled at the Kennedy Center of Urban Affairs, and

-8 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

not simply Harvard men, who tied their careers to political out-
comes in the years preceding the American election of 1968. Some
had pinned their hopes on the election of Robert Kennedy, and,
when the latter was assassinated, it was for them not only a
national tragedy but also a career calamity. Being close to power
also involves being close to funds, funds for research, of course;
and despite protestations to the contrary, this is also linked to
appreciable increments in professional prestige and personal
income.

Nor is it simply the pull of larger, distant things and great public
events but the press of smaller, nearer things that punctuates the
rhythm of academic days: the Byzantine conniving about the chair-
manship of departments; the upward and onward press toward
promotion and keeping up with those with whom one had been at
graduate school; the daily exposure to young, still unshaped minds,
and the wallowing in their admiration, or the bitterness at their
ingratitude when it is not forthcoming; the comparing of the size
of class enrollments at the beginning of each semester, while
pretending not to care about something as vulgar as that; the
careful noting of who has been invited to whose home and the
pain of being excluded.

These and countless other things comprise the texture of the
sociologist’s world, which is probably not altogether different from
other worlds. It is really quite impossible to imagine that men who
care as much about the world as sociologists do, will be untouched
by it. It is fantasy to believe that a man's work will be autonomous
from his life or that his life will not be profoundly consequential
for his work. The daily texture of the sociologist’s life integrates
him into the world as it is; more than that, it makes this world,
and indeed its very problems, a source of gratification. It is a
world in which the sociologist has moved onward and upward,
with increasing access to the corridors of power, with growing
public acknowledgment and respect, and with an income and a
style of life increasingly like that of comfortably privileged strata
(or, if a younger man, with considerable prospects). Sociologists
have, in short, become men with a very substantial stake in
society.

Their own personal experience of success suffuses with congenial
sentiment their conception of the society within which this hap-
pened. It colors their personal reality with a tacit conviction of the
opportunity in and viability of the status quo. At the same time,
however, the sociologist’s work often brings him to a first-hand
acquaintance with suffering. The complacency and yea-saying bom
of the sociologist’s personal success thus often conflicts with what
he sees as a sociologist.

Sociology and Sub-Sociology 59

This tension is neither casual nor accidental, but is the inevita-
ble outcome of his contradictory role in the world. The sociologist’s
value to his social world depends in substantial measure upon its
failures and its consequent need for ideas and information that
will enable it to cope with them. The sociologist’s personal oppor-
tunities thus grow as the crisis of his society deepens. His very
efforts to fulfill his social mandate, the studies for which he is
rewarded and the rewards that link him to the status quo thus
also bring him closer to society’s failures. His awareness of these
failures, however, is largely seen from his perspective of realized
personal ambitions. The failures of society, that is, do not resonate
the sociologist’s own sense of personal failure; they are seen
through the softening lens of a personal reality that knows success
to be possible within this society.

The tension between the sociologist’s personal reality of success
and his occupationally-induced awareness of societal failure often
finds its resolution in political liberalism, for this is an ideology
that allows him to seek remedies for the failures of society without
challenging its essential premises. It is an ideology that allows him
to seek change in his society while still working within and, indeed,
for it. The ideology of liberalism is the political counterpart of the
contemporary sociologist’s claim to autonomy. Liberalism is the
politics toward which the conventional professional ideology of
autonomy is disposed to drift.

In the end, however, a critique of the ideology of autonomy, as
of liberalism, must recognize that it does serve as a brake upon the
sociologist’s full assimilation into his society. The ideology of au-
tonomy involves partial acquiescence, but it is better by far than
an ideology sanctioning total submission to society. “Autonomy”
is the timid form of the verb “to resist.” Like liberalism, it means :
accept the system, work within it, but also try to maintain some
distance from it. A critique of the ideology of autonomy must show
what autonomy means in practice, that it entails a measure of
contradiction with the very claims of sociology itself. Yet such
a critique does not make the most fair case if it merely affirms that
autonomy is a myth. For autonomy is still a regulative ideal, even
if it (like others) can never be perfectly fulfilled. Rather, the
problem is that autonomy is too often given only ritualistic lip
service by successful men comfortable within the status quo, and
frequently is not pursued even to its achievable potentialities.

From one perspective, to affirm the value of autonomy is to
insist that the story the sociologist tells be his own story, that it be
an account in which he truly believes and to which he commits
himself. Autonomy is, in one form, an insistence upon authenticity.
It says that if a man can never tell the "whole truth,” then at

60 Sociolog}': Contradictions and Infrastructure

least he should strive to tell his own truth. It may be that this is
the closest we can get to “objectivity” within the framework of
liberal assumption. At any rate, the claim to autonomy may provide
leverage for those who believe that there can, even now, be a
great deal more of it than one presently finds. The claim to au-
tonomy at least legitimates efforts to know more about the textured
reality that is part of the sociologist’s daily surround, for it says
to him: you must find out what it is that actually limits your
autonomy and makes you and your work less than you want it to
be. Such analysis can lead us to begin to know the larger implica-
tions of what the sociologist is doing in the world and to extend
his self-awareness.

The object of a critique of the ideology of autonomy, then, is
not to unmask the sociologist but, by confronting him with the
frailty and ambiguity of his own professions, to stir his self-
awareness. Its object is not to discredit his efforts at autonomy but
to enable these to be realized more fully by heightening awareness
of the social forces that, surrounding and penetrating the sociolo-
gist, subvert his own ideals.

NOTES

1. M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

2. Stephan C. Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1942).

3. Charles E. Osgood, George Suci, and Percy Tannenbaum, The Measure-
ment of Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957).

4. See J. T. Sprehe, ‘The Climate of Opinion in Sociology: A Study of the
Professional Value and Belief Systems of Sociologists” (Ph.D. Dissertation,
Washington, January 1967).

5. American Sociology, T. Parsons, ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

6. S. M. Lipset, “Political Sociology,” in Parsons, American Sociology,
p. 159 -

7. American Sociology, p. 237.

8. Ibid., p. 263.

9. Ibid., p. 270.

10. Ibid., p. 278.

11. Ibid., p. 279.

12. Charles Tilly, ‘The Forms of Urbanization,” in Parsons, American
Sociology, p. 77.

13. Peter Blau, ‘The Study of Formal Organization,” in Parsons, American
Sociology, p. 54.

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62 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

as a part of the popular, everyday culture of the middle class; for
■with its advent a major revolution was wrought in the value system
by which men and social roles were now to be judged.

This development is historically traceable to the nature of the
feudal regimes in which the middle class was incubated and to
the “old regimes” against which it rebelled in the course of its
birth. In the feudal context the middle class was submerged among
the “commoners” and had only a negative or residual identity,
legally and socially; it was an identity assigned to all who were
not clergy, not noble, and not serfs. As the middle class proliferated
this single status came to encompass an enormous variety of life
styles and circumstances, including both the master and his ser-
vant, the banker and the bootmaker. Co

This residual and negative identity reflected the historical emer-
gence of the middle class as a stratum only casually articulated to
a feudal structure, which centered its legal system and its strategic
identities — peasant or serf and lord — around relationships to the
land. Moreover, middle-class activities were also irrelevant to the
medieval Church’s central religious interest in the salvation of
souls, and indeed were often directly at variance with religious
values calling for worldly renunciation. The middle class was, in
most ways, distant from the center of feudal culture and thus
slowly developed an institutional life and culture of its own, which
was parallel to the feudal one and protected by being a relatively
insulated extrusion into the emerging towns. 3 8

Living to the side, as it were, of the prized concerns of Christian
culture and of the feudal order, and without a firm and honored
place in them, middle-class life was not esteemed but was tolerated
by the elites because of its sheer usefulness. From the standpoint
of the feudal order’s system of social identities, the middle class
did not exist; it was nothing, socially speaking. It is in this vein
that the Abbe Sieyes, asking What Is the Third Estate?, replies
that it is "nothing,” but wants to be "something.” From the feudal
standpoint it was not what the middle class was that counted, but
what it did: the services and functions it performed. In time,
however, the middle class came to pride itself upon its very utility
and came to measure all other social strata by their utility or
imputed lack of it. The wheel came full circle when the middle-
class standard of utility was adopted and prized by other groups.
Sheer utility then became a claim to respect rather than merely a
basis for begrudging tolerance.

The middle-class standard of utility developed in the course of
its polemic against the feudal norms and aristocratic claims of the
“old regimes,” in which the rights of men were held to be derived
from and limited by their estate, class, birth, or lineage: in short,

•nxnvF.RSlTY OF JOLllFOH LI- jRAR.^

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology 63

by what they “were” rather than by what they did. In contrast, the
new middle class held in highest esteem those talents, skills, and
energies of individuals that contributed to their own individual
accomplishments and achievements. The middle-class standard of
utility implied that rewards should be proportioned to men’s per-
sonal work and contribution. The usefulness of men, it was now
held, should control the station to which they might rise or the
work and authority they might have, rather than that their station
should govern and admit them to employment and privileges.

In the eighteenth century, then, adults and adult roles came
increasingly to be judged by the middle class in terms of the use-
fulness imputed to them. Thus, on the eve of the French Revolu-
tion the Abbe Sieyes proclaimed: “Take away the privileged orders,
and the nation is not smaller but greater . . . [the] privileged class
is assuredly foreign to the nation by its do-nothing uselessness.”
Here, of course, Sieyes was thinking largely of the aristocracy,
which, despite its growing commercial interests, still commonly
rejected the full-time pursuit of business or of civic professions
other than the clergy, and which, unless impoverished, usually did
not even manage its own estates. During the Revolution the rich
middle class was itself denounced by the most militant or Jacobin
wing of revolutionaries, partly for taking venal advantage of the
national peril but, also and emphatically, as useless “idlers.” By
the nineteenth century few intellectuals would have argued with
Flaubert when he held that the creed of the bourgeoisie was that
“one must establish oneself . . . one must be useful . . . one must
work.”

Looked at in terms of how it appeared to those involved, the
rising middle class’s demand for usefulness was above all an
attempt to revise the bases on which, and hence the groups to
which, public rewards and opportunities would be open. “Utility”
took on meaning in a specific context involving a particular set
of social relations, where it was used initially to dislodge the aris-
tocracy from preeminence and to legitimate the claims and social
identity of the rising middle class. In this regard the standard of
utility entailed a claim that rewards should be allocated not on the
basis of birth or of inherited social identity, but on the basis of
talent and energy manifested in individual achievement. This was
antitraditionalistic and antiascriptive, proachievement and pro-
individualistic. It entailed an emphasis on what the individual did,
rather than on who he was or on what he was bom. From the new
middle-class standpoint, all feudal social identities were obsolete
and no longer a basis for valid claims. There were now only indi-
viduals; all were “citizens” fundamentally alike in that all were
endowed with the same "natural rights"; all were to be judged

64 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

from the same standpoint, in terms of the same single set of values.

Utilitarianism was naturally linked to the extension of uni-
versalism. In other words, the middle-class value of utility, as well
as its other values, was held to apply to all men — all were expected
to be useful. In this respect the structure of middle-class values
differed importantly from feudal or aristocratic values, which had
held that different groups or estates were obliged to manifest the
different values appropriate to themselves. The privileges and obli-
gations of the aristocracy were not expected to be those of the com-
moners. As Cesar Grana remarks, “The bourgeoisie was the first
niling class in history whose values could be acquired by all
classes, and bourgeois culture was, in this sense, the first true
democratic culture.” 1

At the same time that utilitarianism extended universalism, it
also depersonalized the individual. In focusing public interest on
the usefulness of the individual, it focused on a side of his life that
had significance not in its personal uniqueness but only in its
comparability, its inferior or superior usefulness, to others. Bour-
geois utilitarianism was thus both individualistic and impersonal.
Despite all its talk about the universal “rights of man,” bourgeois
utilitarianism saw men as having a kinship with other objects; all
were now commonly judged by their usefulness and in terms of
the consequences of their employment.

Developed in the course of its struggle against the nobility, the
ideology of usefulness was in part a residual concept: the useful
was that which the nobility was not. Identified as the opposite of
the nobility, the useful were those whose lives manifestly did not
turn on a round of leisure and entertainment, but who worked at
routine economic roles in which they produced marketable goods
and services. The middle class experienced itself as “useful” be-
cause, on the one hand, it conceived itself primarily as a producer
rather than as a consumer like the nobility, and, on the other,
because what it produced, it held, was what others tvanted. The
middle class thus maintained that their own interests could not be
served apart from satisfying the interests of others: one was useful
because one served.

It is clear that this concept of utility predicated the existence of
a market on which men could buy what they wanted and for which
others could produce what was wanted. Utilitarian culture was
rooted in experience with and access to markets for goods and
services. To appraise a man or an act from the standpoint of use-
fulness is to appraise their “consequences,” which is a far more
crucial concern in a market than in a manorial economy. A
manorial economy is a self-sufficient one, where production and
consumption are by the same people and under a single manage-

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology 65

ment; in a market economy, however, there is a gap between
production and consumption. In a manorial economy the people
and wants to be satisfied by production are relatively well known
and stabilized by traditional standards; the problem, therefore, is
the mobilization of resources sufficient for the maintenance of
traditional styles of life. In a market economy the central problem
is possible “overproduction,'’ for production is for a changing, often
fluctuating group of relatively unknown and uncontrollable con-
sumers; the producer does not know which people, if any, will want
or be able to buy what he has produced. His problem is not simply
the mobilization of resources, but the calculation of the possible
consequences of his own decisions. In a market economy the useful-
ness of production has to be calculated carefully in advance, yet
one must then wait to see whether the production of certain things
is wanted, and thereby rewarding to the producer. In a market
economy “good intentions” axe not enough to validate action; inten-
tion and action can be validated only by their consequences in an
uncontrollable market. Since these consequences are uncertain,
it is “results that count.” The rise and spread of utilitarian culture
thus predicated the transition from a manorial to a market econ-
omy, and the rise of a social class whose fortunes were linked with
a market and whose disposition, therefore, was toward the calcula-
tion of consequences.

ANOMIE: THE NORMAL PATHOLOGY
OF UTILITARIANISM

A utilitarian culture, then, inevitably places a great stress upon
winning or losing, upon success or failure as such, rather than
upon the character of the intention that shapes a person's course
of action or upon the conformity of his intention with a preestab-
lished rule or model of propriety. No matter how well-intended —
i.e., designed to conform — a given action is, it may still fail to
have a benign outcome in a market economy. Moreover, if con-
formity with established rules were to be the basis for judging
actions or roles, then this would have given precedence to the
claims of the nobility, which, unlike those of the middle class,
were sanctioned by tradition.

To a considerable extent, furthermore, utilitarian culture clashes
with Christianity, which is an “intention morality,” judging men

Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

and actions by the conformity of their intentions with estabhshed
morality. The emerging utilitarianism of the middle class was dis-
sonant with the Christian conception of morality as supematurally
sanctioned. The Baron d’Holbach argued during the Enlightenment
that duties do not derive from God, but from man’s own nature;
and most of the philosophes accepted Touissant’s definition of
virtue as “fidelity in fulfilling obligations imposed by reason One
should not hurt others, not because this is forbidden by the Mosaic
code or the Golden Rule, but because it is not prudent to do so.
Christianity thus contracted a terminal (or interminable) illness,
and, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was no surprise
to many when Nietzsche pronounced the death of God.

Since the useful is judged in terms of the consequences of
actions, the useful is a contingent thing that might vary with, or be
relative to, time and place. Again, that which is useful is so only
relative to that for which it is useful. Things are useful only in
relation to something else, to an “end.” There was a drift toward
relativism in utilitarianism. Thus, while John Locke sought a
single and universal standard of morality in “happiness,” he also
stressed that “there is scarcely a principle of morality to be named,
or rule of virtue to be thought . . . which is not somewhere or
other slighted and condemned by the fashion of whole societies of
men, governed by practical opinions and rules of living quite op-
posite to others.”

From the standpoint of utilitarian culture, it is not some tran-
scendental standard above men, but men themselves and their own
nature that become the measure. Things assume utility in relation
to men, to their interests and happiness. To evaluate men or things
in terms of their consequences is to evaluate them in terms of how
they may be used to pursue an interest, rather than of what they
are in themselves or because they may be deemed good in their
own right. Things are good or evil not in themselves, but in whether
they produce agreeable outcomes. Benjamin Franklin could there-
fore argue that even sexuality is not bad as such, for its meaning
depends on its compatibility with health and repute. And Bernard
de Mandeville, in his Fable of the Bees (1714), similarly main-
tained that even behavior flatly at variance with certain traditional
moralities, for example, greed and luxury, might be the very basis
of prosperity. “What we call evil in this world,” he held, “is the
grand principle that makes us social creatures.” The transvaluation
of values thus begins in utilitarianism.

Since utilitarian culture stresses the evaluation of consequences,
whether anticipated or already existent, its center of attention
begins to shift from moral to cognitive judgment. The question of

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology 67

whether an action is intrinsically "right” is increasingly superseded
by efforts to appraise its consequences and therefore by efforts to
determine what these will be or are. Questions about human be-
havior increasingly become factual rather than moral issues. In
this vein, David Hume held that morality could not be deduced
a priori from reason, but only inductively, by inspecting and seeing
the consequences of behavior. The groundwork was thus being
laid for the separation of facts and values, of empirical and moral
questions, as, for example, in Kant’s contention that “from the
critical standpoint . . . the doctrine of morality and the doctrine of
nature may each be true in its own sphere.”

For all this variety of reasons, utilitarianism has a built-in
tendency to restrict the sphere of morality; to enlarge the im-
portance attributed to purely cognitive judgment; to diminish the
credibility of an intention-oriented morality such as Christianity;
to select courses of action on grounds independent of moral pro-
priety or impropriety; and, in its future-orienting dependence on
consequences not yet realized, to defer moral judgment by making
it auxiliary to cognitive judgment. In brief, utilitarian culture has
a tendency to ignore or deviate from established moral values,
however hallowed by tradition or religion. This is in large part
what Karl Marx was suggesting when he maintained that "the
bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part . . .
[it] has put an end to all feudal, patriarchical, idyllic relations. . . .
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of
chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy
waters of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth
into exchange value . . . stripped of its halo every occupation
hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.”

To put the matter in another, a Durkheimian manner, a bour-
geois utilitarian culture has a “natural” or built-in disposition
toward moral normlessness or “anomie,” and this disposition de-
rives from, among other things, the very character of its own
commitments and emphases. It is not only that men abandon their
moral code in a bourgeois society because its competitiveness
induces them to disregard morally appropriate methods and to use
any efficient means of achieving success, but more fundamentally
that in all spheres of life their concern with the “useful” leads them
to a prior and focal concern with the consequences of their actions,
and thereby makes moral judgment auxiliary to factual questions
concerning consequences. When men in a utilitarian culture focus
on the useful, they are not abandoning but rather are giving con-
scientious conformity to the central requirements of their “moral”
code.

68 Sociolog)': Contradictions and Infrastructure

The point here may be clarified by reference to Robert Merton’s
analysis of the sources of anomie in society. Merton remarks that
when

the cultural emphasis shifts from the satisfactions deriving from com-
petition itself to an almost exclusive concern with the outcome, the re-
sultant stress makes for the breakdown of the regulatory structure. With
this attenuation of institutional controls, there occurs an approximation
to the situation erroneously held by the utilitarian philosophers to be
typical of society, a situation in which calculations of personal advan-
tage and fear of punishment are the only regulating agencies.-

The “almost exclusive concern with outcomes” to which Merton
refers is a distinctive characteristic of utilitarian culture; it is not
an aberration of utilitarian society but its normal cultural emphasis.
Thus, if the utilitarian philosophers erroneously regarded this as
“typical of society” in general, as Merton says, their theoretical
statements were accurate reflections of the conditions growingly
characteristic of their own bourgeois society.

To say that an action should be judged by its consequences does
not per se indicate how these consequences should be evaluated.
Utilitarian culture might be characterized, therefore, as having a
standpoint which, while insistently focusing on the consequences
of actions, does so without an equally insistent concern with the
standards in terms of which these consequences will themselves
be judged. The ultimate ends frequently reside only in subsidiary
awareness. This implies that, even though things are “useful” only
in relation to some goal, the goal itself is not dubious or problem-
atic. Under what conditions is this likely to occur? For one, when
the selection and pursuit of goals are felt to be “private matters,”
more or less protected from public criticism and debate because the
individual is held to be the best judge of his own interests and of
what is worth pursuing: laissez faire, laissez seule. To allow each
to pursue goals of his own choosing premises that no common
standards of value are more important than the right of each to
pursue his own interests, and it implies, furthermore, a belief in
the fundamental harmony of interests among men.

The ends of action may also be taken as “givens,” because utili-
tarianism assumes they are more or less obvious to “anyone in his
right mind.” This occurs when there are certain ways in which a
variety of different concrete ends are felt to be essentially alike;
being alike, they need not be appraised and differentiated. No
problem then resides in ordering or selecting among them, and
there may therefore be little concern with clearly delineating moral
standards in terms of which this could be done. The ends of action
may also be taken as given when there are one or several things

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology 69

that can facilitate the achievement of a wide variety of different
ends — that is, when there are some things that are, in effect, “all-
purpose” utilities. These two conditions are precisely those that
obtain in a market economy.

A large variety of concrete ends may be viewed as essentially
alike when they are all for sale on the market and thus all have a
price. And in a market economy there is a thing that permits the
routine acquistion of a wide variety of different concrete ends,
namely, money. Money is an all-purpose utility in middle-class
society; possess it, and a great many desired things are no longer
problematic but can be routinely bought. Under this condition,
what is problematic is not what one wants or should want, but
whether one has the money to buy it. Here, what is “useful” is what
makes money.

There is one other all-purpose utility in middle-class society, and
that is knowledge. In order to appraise consequences one must
know them; in order to control consequences one must employ
technology and science. Therefore, in a utilitarian culture knowl-
edge and science are shaped by strongly instrumental conceptions.
It is chiefly out of a desire for wealth, said de Tocqueville, “that
a democratic people addicts itself to scientific pursuits.” There is,
however, something of a difference in emphasis among different
sections of the middle class concerning these two all-purpose
utilities. Propertied sections of the middle class tend to emphasize
the importance of money, while educated and professional sections
are somewhat more likely to stress knowledge and the education
that will produce it . 3

In emphasizing that bourgeois utilitarianism focuses upon the
importance of appraising the consequences of actions, I do not of
course mean to suggest that bourgeois culture is devoid of absolute
moral commitments in which the concern is to do what is "right”
for its own sake, but rather to focus on the pressures generated
against such moral commitments by the bourgeois concern for
utility. The rising bourgeoisie was, indeed, sometimes concerned
with morality apart from utility even to the point of piety. Often
the common image of the bourgeoisie quite correctly stressed the
frequent conjunction of morality and utility. Thus Baudelaire’s
Leporello, symbol of the new bourgeois, was said to be “cold,
reasonable and vulgar, [and] speaks of nothing but virtue and
economy, two ideas that he naturally associates.” The middle-class
moral code often professed many of the same obligations demanded
by traditional morality. What was new about it was not only that
there were new individual items of belief in the code but that
their priorities and emphases — especially the preeminence attached
to the norm of utility — gave the moral code as a whole a new

70 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

structuring. It was as if the Church’s once subsidiary admonition
of Prudence had been elevated to parity with, if not precedence
over, the Golden Rule, Justice, Goodness, and Mercy.

In one of its first great public acts the French middle class had
made a “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” in which
it had formally outlined its moral code. It affirmed, among other
things: that men were free and equal in their rights; that they had
natural and imprescriptible rights to property, security, and resist-
ance to oppression; that they had a natural right to do whatever
did not harm another, and that this could be abridged only by law;
that any man could do what was not forbidden by law; that men
were presumed innocent until found guilty; that men had a right
to the free communication of thoughts and opinions, to speak,
write, and print freely; and that men could not be deprived of their
property, since it is inviolable and sacred, except by certification
of law and compensation in advance. In its affirmation that all
social distinctions should be based upon a common utility, the
Declaration of Rights indicated that “utility” was a moral value of
the middle class and not just a pragmatic yardstick.

Middle-class thought, in fine, postulated a “natural” morality, one
of whose central precepts was the morality of utility itself. It
began, therefore, with an inherent tension. For, in affirming the
centrality of utility it emphasized that men should concern them-
selves with the consequences of their actions, but in conceiving of
men as having natural imprescriptible rights, it assumed that
men also had intrinsic rights, the validity of which did not depend
upon consequences. Since men often reveal their most salient con-
cerns at the very beginning and end of their communications, it
is notable that among the first words of the Declaration of Rights
is an emphasis on utility and among the last is an emphasis on
property rights. The very structure of the Declaration of Rights
reveals the contradictory structure of bourgeois morality, bound-
aried by utility on the one side and by property on the other.

I have already suggested that there was an inherent tendency
for the middle class’s utilitarian concern with consequences to
subvert any morality that demanded conformity with rules for their
own sake; in short, there was in utilitarianism a continual tendency
for bourgeois morality to drift toward an anomic normlessness. In
some part, “utility” was always a thinly disguised rationalization
for avarice and venality and the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest.
Yet, in some part, utility was also a genuinely held and strongly felt
precept of bourgeois morality itself. The bourgeois often felt a
moral obligation to be useful. That the emerging bourgeoisie was
indeed capable of a genuine moral passion was made perfectly
plain by the austerities and moral zeal of the Jacobins. Thus, if

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology 71

utility tended to undermine a conformity with morality for its
own sake, the resultant anomic normlessness was in part the
paradoxical outcome of a commitment to utility that was itself
moral.

The very precariousness of bourgeois morality was visible in that
central document in which the middle classes most clearly affirmed
their moral code, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Here the
point was expressly made that “no hindrance should be put in the
way of anything not prohibited by law, nor may any man be forced
to do what the law does not require.” In effect, then, morality was
divorced from law, and its claim upon men was limited. Law
registered the public interest, and morality was now a private
matter. In this context a man might still be a good citizen even if
a moral leper. A man might now claim the protection of the law
in his very refusal to conform with the moral code. In its net effect
the Declaration of the Rights of Man circumscribed the claims of
traditional morality even as it enlarged the new claims of utility.

I have suggested that at the core of bourgeois utilitarianism was
the premise that a man’s rewards should be proportioned to his
abilities and contributions. More precisely, it might be said that,
from the bourgeois standpoint, abilities, talent, and contribution
were tacitly regarded only as a sufficient condition for reward, but
not as a necessary condition of it. That is, it was held that talent
should be rewarded, but not talent alone, for the bourgeois believed
that his property and investments also were entitled to a return,
quite apart from his own abilities and talents. In short, the bour-
geoisie did not regard itself as entitled to managerial income alone.
Indeed, this is precisely the meaning of the last clause in the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, which held that property was a
natural and sacred right of men and could not be expropriated
without due process and compensation. The middle class never
believed that its property-derived incomes — its right to rents,
profits, interest — were justified only in terms of the utility of the
property. The middle class insisted that property and men of
property -were useful to society and deserving of honor and other
rewards because of this; but men of property also held that property
was sacred in itself, and, in doing so, made a tacit claim that its
rewards should not depend only upon its usefulness. The property
interests of the middle class have thus always exerted a strain
against its own utilitarian values, particularly when these were
formulated in general and universal forms. When it was first de-
veloped as a polemic against “aristocratic uselessness,” utilitari-
anism had asserted that the useless should not be rewarded. But
the middle class was very reluctant to confine its claims to this one
standard and was absolutely unwilling to do so with respect to

72 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

property. In short, middle-class property has been one of the basic
sources for the subversion of middle-class utilitarianism.

Middle-class property, indeed, has not only undermined its own
norm of utility but has also subverted other aspects of its moral
code. For example, the middle class’s revolutionary slogan of
Liberty and Equality was, at first, almost universally hedged with
demands that there be property qualifications for the franchise.
Thus Guizot spoke in the Chamber of Deputies in 1847 on the
question of whether the franchise should be extended to men of
intellectual attainments without regard to their income or property.-
though he boasted of his "infinite respect for intelligence," none-
theless he opposed this extension of the franchise. For all the use
they saw in technology, and however much they vaunted reason,
men of properly were loath to allow scientists, if poor, to partici-
pate in governance. Middle-class culture thus embodied tensions
between property and morality, between property and utility, as
well as between morality and utility.

The utilitarian focus on consequences also began to influence
social relationships; utility, as distinct from traditional rights and
obligations, increasingly became the basis on which social relation-
ships were maintained and justified. From a utilitarian standpoint,
the rights of individuals came increasingly to be viewed as
contingent on the useful contributions that they made to others.
Correspondingly, the obligations of individuals were also increas-
ingly viewed as contingent on the benefits that they received from
others. Those not receiving benefits from others were not deemed
to be obligated to provide benefits in return. Charity and noblesse
oblige no longer applied; all was now increasingly contingent on
reciprocity. One gave because others had given to one in the past
and in order to encourage or obligate others to provide what one
wanted in the future.

This affected not only the relationships between persons but also
the relationships between citizens and the state. Political loyalty
became increasingly contingent upon the state's contribution to the
individual’s well-being, not simply as a matter of fact but even as a
matter of right and principle. As the Baron DTIolbach had re-
marked: "the pact that binds man to society ... is conditional and
reciprocal, and a society which cannot bring well-being to us loses
all rights upon us." It is the state’s duty to concern itself with and
to protect the individual’s well-being, and if it fails in this the
individual is under no obligation to be loyal. From a utilitarian
standpoint, all now have a legitimate claim on the state to protect
their well-being, for the public sphere, like others, is to be judged
by its consequences for individuals.

In effect, the state’s contribution to the well-being of individuals

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology 73

became the standard of its political legitimacy. The state was thus
demystified. There was everywhere a secularizing consequence of
middie-class utilitarianism. The utilitarian had no obligations to a
state that did not protect his interests and, correspondingly, be-
lieved that the political loyalty of other social strata would be un-
dermined when their well-being was neglected. It was similarly
assumed that political loyalty could be instrumentally generated or
deliberately mobilized by aid provided through the state. In short,
bourgeois utilitarianism was consistent with the assumptions of
the Welfare State to whose development it contributed.

THE UNEMPLOYED SELF

Although subverted and limited by property interests and tempered
by a belief in natural rights, "utility” has nonetheless provided a
central standard by which middle-class societies evaluate activities
and roles. In large reaches of our society and particularly in the
industrial sector, it is not the man that is wanted. It is, rather, the
function he can perform and the skill with which he can perform
it for which he is paid. If a man’s skill is not needed, the man is
not needed. If a man’s function can be performed more econom-
ically by a machine, the man is replaced. This has at least two
obvious implications. First, opportunities for participation in the
industrial sector are contingent upon the usefulness imputed to a
man and his activity; so, in order to gain admission to it — and thus
to its rewards — a man must submit to an education and to a social-
ization that early validates and cultivates only selected parts of
himself, those that are expected to have subsequent utility. Second,
once admitted to participation in the industrial sector, there is a
strong tendency to appraise and reward him in terms of his utility
as compared to that of other men.

Both processes have, of course, one common consequence: they
operate as selective mechanisms, admitting some persons and some
talents or faculties of individuals, while at the same time excluding
others, thereby roughly dividing men and their talents into two
pools, those useful and those not useful to industrial society. The
not-useful men become the unemployed and unemployable: the
aged, unskilled, unreliable, or intractable. Much the same selective
inclusion and exclusion occurs in regard to particular attributes of
individual persons. The useless qualities of persons are either un-
rewarded or actively punished should they intrude upon the em-

74 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

ployment of a useful skill. In other words, the system rewards and
fosters those skills deemed useful and suppresses the expression
of talents and faculties deemed useless, thereby imprinting itself
upon the individual personality and self.

Correspondingly, the individual learns what the system requires:
he learns which parts of himself are unwanted and unworthy; he
is induced to organize his self and personality to conform with
the operating standards of utility, for to the extent he does so he
presumably can minimize the friction he feels while participating
in such a system. In short, vast parts of any personality must be
suppressed or repressed in the course of playing a role in industrial
society. All that a man is that is not useful will somehow be ex-
cluded or at least not allowed to intrude, and he thereby becomes
alienated or estranged from a large sector of his own interests,
needs, and capacities. Thus, just as there is the unemployed man,
there is also the unemployed self. Because of the exclusions and
devaluations of self fostered by an industrial system oriented
toward utility, many men develop a dim sense of loss, for the
excluded self, although muffled, is not voiceless and makes its
protest heard. They feel an intimation that something is being
wasted, and this something may be nothing less than their lives.

THE PECUNIARY PARADIGM OF UTILITY

In the daily operations of a bourgeois culture utility is commonly
measured by the production of wealth and incomes, whether by
individuals, enterprises, or nations. This was and largely remains
the core meaning, the specifying cultural paradigm, of utility in
practical social discourse. As a result, a salient defintion of work
and of occupation in our society is that it is “gainful employment”
in a pecuniary sense. In such a context, unemployment is the mark
of failure, but an unwillingness to work at a remunerative employ-
ment is a moral outrage and a mark of degraded character. Cor-
respondingly, sheer wealth or income is a basis of esteem, regard-
less of how (or whether) it is earned. Utility or imputation of
utility thus tends to become an historical ballast that may be
dropped; a middle-class culture that initially held that men’s
rewards ought to be proportioned to their contributions and use-
fulness eventually yields to one in which the prime consideration
is sheer marketability, the pecuniary worth of goods and services
quite apart from their imputed utility. In short, the focus comes to

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology 75

be placed on whether they will sell and for how much, and con-
cern centers on improving the effectiveness of marketing rather
than the usefulness of what is being marketed.

When the financially gainful employment of time becomes a
dominant criterion for human usefulness and social worth, even
the most traditionally prized of human activities may come to be
viewed as frivolous, empty, or questionable when pursued for its
own sake, and often enough it has to be justified in public discourse
in terms more “tough-minded,” like utility.

Writing poetry or painting pictures may be viewed as an ac-
ceptable occupation if it sells; but it is often viewed as dubious, or
worse, if it does not. The poverty of the ordinary clergy, however
genteel, registers the low market price and marginal place of the
values the clergy are supposed to protect. The income of educators
in systems of higher learning is correlated with their imputed use-
fulness in preparing young people for imputedly useful vocations.
And in a social world where gainful employment is a measure of
human worth, the place of children, young people, and women who
earn no incomes is uncertain. In a culture that measures value by
gainful employment, of what value are painters and poets, priests
and prophets?

In such a culture traditional values come to be regarded as
ornamental marginalia: kindness, courage, civility, loyalty, love,
generosity, gratitude — all these cease to be viewed as essential to
the ordinary routines of industrial work and even of public life. It
is not how well a man does his job that counts, nor what kind of
job he has, but what he gets from it that makes him count. Values
other than utility become, within the work setting and also beyond
it to a lesser degree, desirable but dispensable graces. They are the
frosting on the cake.

Between a man’s legal status on the one side, and his economic
utility on the other, there stretches a vast no-man’s-land in which
his behavior is not deemed to be of public relevance. This, we say,
is the realm of privacy and private conscience, in which a man is
“free” to be a saint or a brute. Yet what he is there will also, for
better or worse, prepare him for his other public roles, just as what
he is there will in turn be shaped by them.

To the degree that a man’s usefulness becomes a central criterion
of public judgment, there is created a protected realm of privacy
in which, we often say, his personal characteristics and his 'personal
life are “no concern of ours.” In other words, a good doctor is a
good doctor even if he is Jack the Ripper on his own time. As the
occupational world becomes one of specialized experts judged by
their usefulness, we increasingly regard the traditional decencies
only as private matters. In short, no one wants or assumes responsi-

j6 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

bility for minding the everyday culture. The man seriously con-
cerned with “private” virtue comes to be regarded as eccentric or
neurotic, while, correspondingly, those who pay no attention to the
virtues or vices a man manifests privately pride themselves on
possessing a suitable “tolerance” of human foibles. Since Rousseau,
it has been a matter of common knowledge that those who insist
on virtue must be somewhat mad and that, in any event, they
lead a lonely life.

In trading virtue for freedom in private life we discover, hov'ever,
that there is often less of both. There is less virtue because a utility-
centered occupational culture, assuring us that it is only “results
that matter,” inures us to personal viciousness. And we have less
freedom too, even in our private lives, because neither the Welfare
State nor the private sector of the economy can permit this. The
private sector, for example, wants to insure that the wives of its
executives are of the right sort and will aid their husbands in
their careers. The Welfare State, similarly, wants to be sure that
the women for whom it provides “Aid to Dependent Children” will
not have further children out of wedlock, whom it will then have to
support.

THE WELFARE STATE AND THE DISPOSAL
AND CONTROL OF THE USELESS

A central problem confronting a society organized around utilitarian
values is the disposal and control of “useless” men and useless
traits. There are various strategies for the disposal and control of
useless men. They may, for example, be ecologically separated and
isolated in spatially distinct locales where they are not painfully
visible to the "useful”! They may be placed, as American Indians
were, on reservations; they may come to live in ethnic ghettos, as
American Blacks do; if they have the means to do so, they may
elect to live in benign environments such as the communities for
the aged in Florida; they may be placed in special training or
retraining camps, as are certain unskilled and unemployed Ameri-
can youth, frequently Black; or again, they may be placed in prisons
or in insane asylums, following routine certification by juridical
or medical authorities.

Transition to a Welfare State does not simply mean transition
from a standard of individual to collective utility; it also implies a
greater involvement of the state in developing and managing the

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology 77

disposal of the “useless.” In some part, the very growth of the
Welfare State means that the problem is becoming so great and
complex that it can no longer be left to the informal control of
market or other traditional institutions. Increasingly, the Welfare
State’s strategy is to transform the sick, the deviant, and the un-
skilled into “useless citizens,” and to return them to “society” only
after periods of hospitalization, treatment, counseling, training, or
retraining. It is this emphasis upon the reshaping of persons that
differentiates the Welfare State’s disposal strategies from those
that tended to cope with the useless primarily by custody, exclusion,
and insulation from society. The newer strategies differ from the
old in that they seek to be self-financing; the aim is to increase the
supply of the useful and to diminish that of the useless.

At the center of the Welfare State’s failures is the fact that its
concern for “welfare” is limited by its commitment to utility: it
demands something “useful” in return for what it gives. Another
problem of the Welfare State is that it is a treadmill operation; it
must continually strive to keep abreast of continuing increases in
mechanization and automation, with their inherent tendency to
generate at least temporary unemployment of men and continual
obsolescence of skills. In the private sector, the useless traits of
persons are eliminated, so far as they can be, by creating machines
that perform functions once performed by men without, however,
being linked to their “useless” traits. In one part, the Welfare
State constitutes an effort to use the state to dispose of the use-
lessness created by the private sector’s own disposal strategies,
mechanization and automation.

Within the private sector one of the relatively new disposal
strategies is the various programs for "human relations in industry.”
These constitute an effort to teach management how to utilize or
readjust the useless parts of self. The excluded self is now acknowl-
edged as impinging on the effective employment of skills; non-
pecuniary motives are being seen as affecting productivity. Larger
and larger reaches of self and social structure are thus fitted into
utilitarian appraisal. Here the system has not changed its values
but has simply extended the range of things it seeks to manage
from the same utilitarian standpoint. Modem sophisticated manage-
ment, for example, seeks to control the “informal” group structures
of factory life, which had hitherto provided opportunities for a
compensatory expression of the human qualities excluded by tradi-
tional utilitarian culture. It also provides psychiatric therapy for
executives under tension. Seeing a new significance in these once
neglected personality and social structures, management extends
the sw'ay of utilitarian standards over them, thereby cutting off
the hinterland into which the personality formerly could retreat

78 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

and from which it once could wage a kind of guerrilla resistance.
Individual “privacy” remains, in principle, a community virtue but
is increasingly infringed upon by all-seeing organizations.

One of the main disposal strategies of a utilitarian culture, then,
is continuously to transform useless things into useful “by-products.”
Personality components and social structures hitherto regarded as
areas of privacy to be ignored or junked, now are viewed as
potentially useful. The escape routes thus become ever fewer. With
such closure the unemployed self is required either to cease re-
sistance altogether or to come out in open rebellion against the
system’s utilitarian values.

THE PSYCHEDELIC REVOLT AGAINST UTILITARIANISM

Since the end of World War II we have seen the beginnings of a
new international resistance against a society organized around
utilitarian values, a resistance, in short, against industrial, not
merely capitalist, society. This is essentially a new wave of an
old resistance to utilitarian culture, one that had begun almost at
once with its emergence in the eighteenth century and that had
crystallized in the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century.

The emergence of new, “deviant” social types today — the cool
cats, the beats, the swingers, the hippies, the acid-heads, the drop-
outs, and the “New Left” itself — is one symptom of a renewed
resistance to utilitarian values. The emergence of “Psychedelic
Culture,” if I may summarize various forms with a single term,
differs profoundly from the protest movements and “causes” of the
ig3o’s, however politically radical, for Psychedelic Culture rejects
the central values to which all variants of industrial society are
committed. Not only does it reject the commercial form of in-
dustrialization, holding money or money-making and status-striving
in disdain, but, much more fundamentally, it also resists achieve-
ment-seeking, routine economic roles whether high or low, in-
hibition of expression, repression of impulse, and all the other
personal and social requisites of a society organized around the
optimization of utility. Psychedelic Culture rejects the value of
conforming usefulness, counterposing to it, as a standard, that
each must “do his own thing.”

In short, many, particularly among the young, are now orienting
themselves increasingly to expressive rather than utilitarian stand-
ards, to expressive rather than instrumental politics, to gratification

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology 79

directly achieved with the aid of drugs, sex, or new communitarian
social forms rather than through work or achievement-striving via
individual competition. To many among them, Psychedelic Culture
is just a last fling before they surrender and become the conforming
cadres of a utilitarian culture. To some, it is a compensation for
their already costly experience of participating in that culture. Yet,
to others, it is a full-time commitment sometimes colored by
genuine religious overtones. Despite the blatant vulgarities and
posturing of some in this resistance movement against utilitarian-
ism, despite their preference for atrocious art nouveau styles and
their youthful self-certainty, this is, I believe, a very serious move-
ment indeed.

In referring to Psychedelic Culture as a modem version of
“Romanticism,” I do not intend that characterization in the in-
vidious sense used by such critics of the New Left as Nathan Glazer
or Daniel Bell. I believe that such polemical use of the notion of
“Romanticism” is not based upon any serious consideration of its
intellectual resources or its historical development. What one
thinks of Romanticism depends, in part, on one’s judgement of
utilitarianism. To assert that Psychedelic Culture is a new species
of a long-familiar Romanticism is, I think, essentially true; to
imply that it is “merely” this is to miss the point of both the earlier
Romanticism and its modem forms. Nineteenth-century Roman-
ticism was, from its beginning, a revolt against utilitarian culture.
What, after all, was the “Philistine” whom the Romantics held in
contempt except a species of utilitarian who saw no use in things
that made no money? Recognizing the earlier Romantic antecedents
of the contemporary resistance movement should not blind us to
the importance of either the old or new version as a reaction
against utilitarianism. If nothing else, the long history of Roman-
ticism testifies to the fact that it has not concerned itself with a
problem transient or peripheral to the culture.

Recognizing the continuity, however, should not blind us to the
differences between the early and the contemporary versions of
Romanticism. When Southey remarked that "the principle of our
social system ... is awfully opposed to the spirit of Christianity,”
he was typical of the many early Romantics who employed Chris-
tian values as a standpoint for social criticism. Modem versions of
Romanticism do not commonly adopt Christianity as a standard,
however strongly religious their impulses may be. In part this is
because they often reject the ascetic strain in Christianity; but in
greater part it is because, living in the God-Is-Dead epoch, they
simply never took Christianity seriously in the first place. Psyche-
delic Romanticism is, after all, post-Nietzschean and post-Freudian.

Modem Psychedelic Romanticism, unlike the earlier version, has

80 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

emerged in an economy of affluence, when the industrial economy
has reached maturation. In other words, early Romanticism re-
jected what were then only the promised fruits of industrial society;
contemporary Psychedelic Romanticism rejects the actually ripened
fruits. Psychedelic Culture therefore represents the rejection of
success, or at least of a system that has succeeded by its own
standards. If a system cannot hold loyalties even when it has
accomplished what it set out to do, it would seem that it has arrived
at a deep level of crisis.

The continuing development of Psychedelic Culture with its
changing forms of deviance suggests that the Welfare State has
not developed strategies to control the middle classes and the rela-
tively well educated. For Psychedelic Culture recruits its members,
to a considerable degree, from persons of middle-class origin. The
Welfare State, however, still basically conceives its charter as re-
quiring it to cope with the poor, the lower, the working classes.

The periodic recurrence of “call girl,” homosexual, and drug
scandals suggests that the membrane between the middle class or
even “high society” on the one side, and the world of the deviant
or demi-monde on the other side, is thinning out in many spots.
Indeed, this is what makes them public “scandals,” instead of
merely crimes. With all manner of transitional forms, the middle
class is beginning to desert its loyalties to traditional utilitarian
culture. This is not altogether new for the elite, and certainly it is
not new for the outcasts and poor who live in ethnic casbahs or in
the ghettos of the “Threepenny” lumpenproletariat. But something
new and different is afoot when even the members of respectable
civic professions begin to “swing” like and with Bohemian artistic
coteries. Insofar as this continues, the rejection of utilitarian cul-
ture by the very low can no longer be dismissed as the consequence
of failure, that is, as a case of sour grapes.

THE LIMITS OF THE WELFARE STATE

In good time the Welfare State will discover that a very new type
of problem confronts it and will once again bestir itself. It is in the
nature of the Welfare State to be a counterpuncher, acting only
after and in response to the undeniable emergence of a “problem.”
Yet, insofar as it seeks to mobilize itself against these new prob-
lems, it will, I suspect, be even more ineffectual than usual. For
one thing, the welfare apparatus that will be used against the

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology Si

middle-class deserters of utilitarian culture will be staffed by their
class kindred, who may have already caught or who are vulnerable
to the very malaise they will be asked to stamp out. They may, in
parts of themselves, be drawn to the subversion of our utilitarian
social order. Still, their vested administrative interests will require
that they do something. Whatever become their private adaptations,
I think it likely that they will seek to publicly define the various
forms of resistance to utilitarian culture, especially as manifested
by their cultural peers in the middle class, as a “sickness" that re-
quires humane and expert treatment by competent authorities —
psychiatrists, social workers, counselors, etcetera.

. The problem-solving style of the Welfare State is, I have sug-
gested, a slow, reactive, and post factum one. Since its operations
are costly, the middle class is loath to submit to taxes except for
problems already fully manifest. Rather than taking a lead on the
target, therefore, the Welfare State commonly shoots directly at or
behind it. But the ineffectuality of the Welfare State derives even
more fundamentally from the fact that it must seek solutions
within the framework of the master institutions that cause the
problem. Accommodate as it must to the private sector, the Welfare
State commonly prefers to attack only those problems whose “solu-
tions” yield returns for those involved in producing the solutions,
quite apart from the solution’s demonstrable effectiveness in re-
lieving the suffering of those experiencing the problem. Nations
thus pile up armaments without any relation to the degree that
these demonstrably enhance national security. In like manner, the
type and level of activity of the Welfare State, and of investment in
it often bears little demonstrable connection with the effectiveness
of its programs. What frequently determines the adoption of a spe-
cific welfare program is not merely the visibility of a critical prob-
lem, not only a humane concern for suffering, and not only a
prudent political preparation for tire next election. What is also of
particular importance is that the adopted solution entail a public
expenditure that will be disbursed, through the purchase of goods
or the payment of salaries, among those who are not on welfare.
It is this that enables the Welfare State to attract and retain a
constituency among middle-class and professional groups.

The Welfare State is thus an ad hoc accommodation to group
and individual egoism. It is a public sector that attacks problems
produced by the nature of the private sector, but must do so in ways
that also yield gratifications to those who are not suffering from
the problems with which the government is attempting to cope.
The Welfare State does not oppose but counterbalances the utili-
tarian assumptions of the middle class; it constitutes an accom-
modation that allows the private sector to maintain its narrow

8z Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

commitment to utility. The Welfare State becomes the agency
through which the “useless” are made useful or are, at least, kept
out of the way.

UTILITARIAN CULTURE AND SOCIAL THEORY

A utilitarian culture affects the development of social theory in a
variety of complex ways. For one, of course, it exposes theory to
the demand that it be formulated in ways and on conceptual levels
that facilitate "application” to what are taken to be “practical”
questions and obvious social problems. Yet the pressure that a
utilitarian culture places on social theory to be “relevant” and to
develop technological potency as an applied science, is limited by
the rewards that can be given to those who conform to the pres-
sure. In short, while a utilitarian culture always exposes social
theory to a demand for practical application, its ability to enforce
this demand depends upon the larger society's readiness and will-
ingness to finance such work and to provide careers for those en-
gaged in it. Since such funding did not begin in earnest until the
relatively recent maturation of the Welfare State, the fullest mani-
festations of this pressure toward the applicable, the practicable,
and the relevant in social theory and sociology do not appear until
well after World War II.

Social theory "for its own sake,” or “pure” social theory, is always
vulnerable and of challengeable legitimacy in a utilitarian culture.
Insofar as “theory” is regarded as the least practicable aspect of
social science — that is, as “mere” theory — the social science of a
utilitarian culture always tends toward a theoryless empiricism,
in which the conceptualization of problems is secondary and
energies are instead given over to questions of measurement, re-
search or experimental design, sampling or instrumentation. A con-
ceptual vacuum is thus created, ready to be filled in by the
common-sense concerns and practical interests of clients, sponsors,
and research funders; in this way sociology is made useful to their
interests.

Yet the effects of a utilitarian culture on social theory are even
more subtle and complex. Far from limiting social theory to a
concern with practical usefulness for limited social problems,
utilitarian culture can also dispose theory in the opposite direction,
particularly when there are few clients ready to supply extensive
funding, toward an abstruse, very general type of Grand Theory.

Utilitarian Culture Gnd Sociology S3

Essentially, this is rooted in an endemic strain -within utilitarian
culture, which continually tends to undermine the apprehended
reality of the object-world as men have traditionally viewed it and to
weaken their image or “social map - of society as they had known it.

A utilitarian culture. like others, shapes man’s most deeply held
conceptions of what is real. On the deepest level, perhaps, this
derives from the kinds of relations and experiences that the culture
encourages or constrains men to have with the total object-world,
that is to say, with the universe of sociallv defined “things.”

Utilitarianism undermines the world of traditionally defined
things, of received, commonsensical. and familiar objects, to which
both reality and value had been imputed. Attending as it does to
the consequences of operating with objects, and especiallv to their
gratification or pleasure, utilitarian culture is constantly with-
drawing attention from the object as such and focusing it instead
on what one gets from using it. Since this depends on and varies
with the use-context, the reality as well as the value of objects
changes with the relationships in which they are placed. Objects
are therefore no longer experienced as having an intrinsic or per-
manent value or reality. The value of an object varies with the
purpose to which it is put. and the nature imputed to it changes
with its contextual location. Utilitarianism, then, induces a view
of objects as shifting things, lacking in fixity. As attention turns
to the use and function of things, it is withdrawn from their stable
and structural aspects, from their cbject-ness. The social world as
a world of objects thus tends to sink into subsidiary awareness:
“If one switches attention away from the object to the pleasure of
the object-relationship, the object is lost sight of. . . .”*

Objects then become interpretable primarily as vehicles or ter-
minals of purpose, or as mediators of consequences. Stated in other
terms, one effect of a utilitarian culture is that the established
cultural mapping of objects, as a socially shared order of reality
and value, tends to be attenuated, with the result being that tradi-
tional definitions or locations of objects have less power to impose
themselves on persons. There is diminished certainty about either
their reality or value. On the one hand, this means a greater pos-
sibility of individual disorientation-and anxiety; on the other hand,
it also means a greater freedom to perceive and conceptualize ob-
jects in new, unconventional, and non-commonsensical ways. And
the two are likely to be connected: the increased disorientation
prompts new efforts at conceptual mapping.

Attenuation of traditional mappings of the object-world is con-
genial to the development of “technical” or “abstruse” social theory,
for there are fewer of those firm convictions about “the way things
are” that would generate a compelling sense of the prime facie

84 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

inappropriateness of newly offered perspectives. At the same time,
as the attenuation of traditional maps frees social theorizing, it
may generate compulsive efforts to redefine the social map. That
is, now one is not simply free to see the social world in new ways;
one is now impelled to do so. Under these conditions theory-making
is exposed to certain tacit demands : specifically, to provide a map
of the world of social objects whose comprehensiveness and order
can reduce the anxieties of a disordered personal reality.

Utilitarian culture may thus focus theory-making on compre-
hensive mapping for two reasons. First, because utilitarian culture
prescribes a concern with situating objects contextually, in terms
of their consequences within a network of objects; second, because
utilitarianism has the unanticipated consequence of breaking down
traditional mappings of the object world. The first creates an ex-
pectation and desire for a mapping, which the second makes
acutely problematic and necessary. What I am saying, then, is that
one implicit task of sociology in the modern world is not simply to
study society but to conceptualize and order it: that is, to con-
ceptually constitute social objects and to map their relationships
with one another. If one looks at what sociologists do, rather than
at what they say they are doing, a great deal of it consists of the
formulation, exemplification, and presentation of an ordered set of
concepts, rather than of laws or empirically verified propositions
about the relations between things. In short, much of sociology —
from the elementary textbook to the work of Talcott Parsons — is
engaged in constituting social worlds, rather than simply in re-
searching them.

Utilitarian culture also has other consequences of considerable
importance for social theory. Most particularly, it entails a shift
from traditional definitions of the object-world, in which the moral
dimension (the “goodness-badness” dimension, in Charles Osgood’s
terms) was comparatively salient, to definitions in which the
power dimension (their “strong-weak” dimension, again in Osgood’s
terms) becomes increasingly salient. 5 Utilitarianism’s focus on con-
sequences engenders an increased concern with the sheer potency
of objects as a way of achieving desired outcomes, independent of
the moral dimension. It is thus not simply that utilitarianism
fosters a concern with cognitive judgments as distinct from moral
evaluations, but that cognitive, judgments themselves come to
center on judgments of potency. In this view, to know what is, is
to know what is powerful; knowledge is power, when knowledge
becomes a knowledge of power.

With the growing salience of the power dimension of objects,
there is a growing sense of a widening split between power and
morality, between the real and the ideal. The real now excludes the

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology S5

moral and tends to become reduced to knowing about power, in the
same sense that Realpolitik implies that a “realistic'’ politics is one
that not only attends exclusively to the power implications of
actions but also invidiously counterposes these to the moral im-
plications.

With utilitarianism there is a growing sense that things of power
may lack morality and that things of value may lack power. In
short, there is a feeling that the world of social objects has become
“grotesque." in the specific sense that the “grotesque" essentially
involves a conjunction of objects (or object attributes) that is felt
to be incongruous and ominous. Postulating, as I do, that the
equilibrium state in the perception of social objects is one where
power and goodness are seen as positively correlated, then the ex-
perience of the grotesque as diffuselv present in the social world
implies a perceptual dissonance to which social theorv must in
some way accommodate itself and which it will seek to reduce. One
can. of course, perceive the social world as having only limited
pockets of grotesqueness, but my point here is that a utilitarian
culture exerts a general and diffuse strain on the integration of
“goodness" and “power." Theorizing that is sensitive to this strain
must address itself to the most fundamental “attribute-space" in
which social objects are located, that is. to the most general latent
structure of the object-world. Rather than focusing on those limited
areas in which a dissonance between goodness and power obviously
manifests itself, the task of social theory is then to reintegrate and
reorganize the most basic coordinates of social space itself.

The effects of a utilitarian culture on the development of social
theory, then, are complex, they are by no means limited to exposing
social theory to the expectation that it have a practical usefulness.
As a result of the attenuation of the object-world and the split
between morality and power, a utilitarian culture generates at least
two tacit problems for social theory, which, when responded to.
are conducive to a distinctive kind of theory. Grand Theory. One is
the problem of coping with grotesqueness, or reducing the dis-
sonance between the dimensions of power and goodness in the
object-world. The other is the problem of coping with the attenua-
tion of older, traditional maps of the object-world and hence of
redefining the objects in the social world and their relationships to
one another in a comprehensive manner. Together, these problems
constitute two of the tacit parameters that shape and define system-
atic social theory. Grand Theory.

In effect, although Grand Social Theory may define itself posi-
tivistically (or at any rate, may nominally define itself as an
essentially scientific activity concerned primarily with furthering
“knowledge” about men and human relationships), it internalizes

Sociolog}': Contradictions and Infrastructure

concerns that actually have little need of “research,” and for which
theory itself is, in some ways, a self-sufficient response. Its social
function, in short, is not simply or primarily to provide “facts”
about the social world, but to provide an anxiety-reducing reorienta-
tion to it, to provide a new, comprehensive mapping which says
what things are and where they belong in relation to one another.

Grand Theory differs from “middle range” theory, whose dom-
inant concern is with the empirical verifiability of its implications,
not because it rejects the importance of “research” but because a
commitment to rigorous and detailed research necessarily and
severely restricts the extension or circumference of the social world
that can be brought into view. Grand Theory is not in conflict with
middle range theory but is engaged with a different kind of prob-
lem; essentially it is a dissonance-reducing, orientational, meaning-
constituting, and order-generating task, rather than a knowledge-
establishing task.

Middle range theory is an effort to avoid both the proclivity of
Positivism to break down into methodological ritualism, as well as
the obvious ideological resonance of the more comprehensive map-
making impulses of Grand Theory. Middle range theory seeks to
map, and proclaims the propriety of mapping, the social world in a
limited way — province by province, sector by sector. In so doing,
it need not render explicit the larger maps of social reality that it
may hold in subsidiary awareness. In some part, middle range
theory corresponds to the growth of professional specialization in
modem sociology and provides a rationale for its narrowness. In
some part, it also corresponds to the closer integration of these
specializations into the Welfare State, with its bureaucratically de-
limited administrative agencies, each chartered to make only lim-
ited reforms in special social sectors. In short, one social function
of middle range theory is to facilitate adaptation to bureaucratic
organizations with limited social missions. In a different vein, how-
ever, Grand Theory seeks the standpoint of total societal recon-
struction, of inter-sectorial change; it is oriented to larger social
crises that are not or cannot be bureaucratically confined and
managed.

NOTES

1. Cesar Grana, Bohemian Versus Bourgeois (New York: Basic Books,
1964), p. 107.

2. R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, 111.: The
Free Press, 1957). P- * 57 -

3. While there is considerable emphasis upon the utilitarian significance

Utilitarian Culture and Sociology Sj

of knowledge and education in middle-class society, there are also other fac-
tors that somewhat attenuate and contravene the utilitarianism of the pro-
fessional sections of the middle class. The professions have a long and
continuous history in which some nonutilitarian orientations have been
protected by professional organizations and transmitted during technical or
professional training in schools or universities, which define themselves as
guardians of "high” values. Professionals arc taught to respect the technical
proprieties, on the one hand, and to proride "service” to client needs, on the
other. The ideology of the civic professions, then, tends to be relatively un-
comfortable with money-making, individualistic utilitarianism and somewhat
more congenial toward a broader, more social form of utilitarianism, which
may under certain conditions even become anti-utilitarian, calling for “knowl-
edge for its own sake.” Some of the significant tensions in modem society
derive from this difference between the educated or professional sectors of
the middle class and the propertied sectors. One important contemporary
expression of this tension arises when education comes to be administered
by the educated sectors of the middle class and the children of even the
propertied middle class come under their tutelage and thus are exposed to
their somewhat different values. Another important modem expression of this
tension in the middle class arises with the later development of the Welfare
State, which is more congenial to the social utilitarianism of the educated
professionals than to the more individualistic utilitarianism of the propertied
middle class. The Welfare State, moreover, is also more directly advantageous
to the career interests of the educated, professional sector, who become the
staff experts and the suppliers or administrators of services provided by the
Welfare State. The Welfare State thereby constitutes itself as an alliance
between the state apparatus and the educated sectors of the middle class,
whose operations are often costly to parts of the propertied sectors and thus
more likely to be opposed by them.

4. H. Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction (New York:
International Universities Press, 1961 ), p. 288.

5. Charles E. Osgood, George Suci, and Percy Tannenbaum, The Measure-
ment of Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957).

CHAPTER

THhat Happened in Sociology:
An Historical Model of
Structural Development

I have so iar attempted to outline a few characteristics of the
utilitarian culture with which middle-class society began; I now
want to explore some ways in which these intertwined with the
development of sociology itself. In doing so, I also hope to secure
leverage for a broader analysis of the structure of Western sociology
and the dynamics of its development. Thus I shall be concerned
here not so much with the substantive content of specific theories
as with the historical development of sociology’s shared infra-
structures, its intellectual and social organization, its differentiation
and sponsorship by different nations and social classes, the division
of intellectual labor in which sociology has taken a part, and the
historical periods or stages in which these structures crystallized or
changed.

Much of what I say below shall be in the nature of flat assertions
concerning these structures and their development, rather than a
probing analysis or an historical documentation. In other words, it
is a preliminary effort at constructing a model about what hap-
pened to Western sociology. In effect, it is a theory of the develop-
ment, and an outline for the history, of modern Western sociology.

There have been four major periods in the international develop-
ment of Western sociology, which are here largely defined in terms
of the theoretical syntheses dominant in each:

Period I, Sociological Positivism, which began about the first
quarter of the nineteenth century in France and to which the key
contributors were Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte;

Period II, Marxism, which crystallized about the middle of the

An Historical Model of Structural Development 89

nineteenth century and expressed an effort to transcend the pow-
erful tradition of German idealism and syncretize it with such
traditions as French socialism and English economics;

Period III, Classical Sociology, which developed about the turn of
the century prior to World War I, and may be conceived as a
period of consolidation and accommodation. It strived to accom-
modate the central developments of the first and second periods by
bridging Positivism and Marxism, or to find a third path. It also
sought to consolidate earlier developments, often only program-
matic in nature, and to embody them in detailed, scholarly re-
searches. It was a “classical” period because most of those scholars
now regarded by academic sociologists as "classical” did their work
at that time: for example, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo
Pareto;

Period IV, Parsonsian Structural-Functionalism, which crystal-
lized during the 1930’s in the United States in the evolving theory
of Talcott Parsons and was given complex development by the
“seed group” of young scholars who early had studied w'ith him at
Harvard: for example, Robert K. Merton, Kingsley Davis, Wilbert
Moore, Robin Williams, and others.

PERIOD I: SOCIOLOGICAL POSITIVISM

The beginnings of Sociological Positivism w r ere characterized by an
ambivalence tov r ard traditional middle-class utilitarianism, being
both critical of and continuous with it. Following the French
Revolution, Henri Saint-Simon — one of the “fathers” of both mod-
em socialism and sociology — formulated his famous parable of
sudden death. In this, Saint-Simon invidiously contrasts the use-
less court ■with the productive industriel. What would happen, he
asks, if France one day lost all of its scientists, industrialists, and
artisans, and on that same day also lost all the officers of the
Crown, its ministers of state, judges, and largest landholders? Of
the latter group, Saint-Simon replies, the loss would only be senti-
mental, grieving the good-hearted French but causing no political
evil to the state, for these useless men could easily be replaced.
From the loss of the former, however, France would be stricken
and would topple from its place as a leading nation. Central to
Saint-Simon’s judgment on men and society was a powerful dis-
tinction between the useless and the useful.

Like Sieyes, Saint-Simon addressed himself to the question, use-

go Sociolog\ T : Contradictions and Infrastructure

ful for whom? Utility, he said, must be for the nation and, indeed,
for humanity as a whole. In his “Letter from an Inhabitant of
Geneva” of 1803, Saint-Simon reminds the poor that

you voluntarily concede a degree of domination to men who perform
sendees which you consider useful to you. The mistake which you make,
in common with the whole of humanity, is in not distinguishing clearly
enough between the immediate and more lasting benefits, between those
of local and more general interests, between those which benefit a part
of humanity at the expense of the rest, and those which promote die
happiness of the whole of humanity. In sort, you have not yet realized
that there is but one common interest to the whole of humanity, the
process of the sciences . 1

Among other things, one may notice here the utilitarian and
scientific framework within which conceptions of collective wel-
fare, essentially continuous with those later embodied in the
Welfare State, are beginning to emerge. That Saint-Simon’s an-
ticipation of the Welfare State, and his linking of it to science and
sociology, was neither cryptic nor casual may be seen in his re-
marks of 1825, where he holds that the elite minority need no
longer maintain itself by force in an industrial society, and that
the problem of integrating the community is now subordinate "to
improving the moral and physical welfare of the nation.” Public
policy, says Saint-Simon, should aim at giving the working class
“the strongest .interest in maintaining public order . . . { and] the
highest political importance,” by state expenditures “ensuring work
for all fit men,” by spreading scientific knowledge among the work-
ing class, and by ensuring that the competent — namely, the in-
dustrialists — administer the nation’s wealth: the public welfare
sector is thus to operate within the framework of the private sector .-
Perhaps the main difference between Saint-Simon’s policies and
those of the modem Welfare State is that he often places the wel-
fare function in nongovernmental hands.

Saint-Simon was also clearly concerned with another question,
namely, what is useful? Here, as noted above, he especially stressed
the utility of science, knowledge, and technology. The central nov-
elty in Saint-Simon’s position, then, was not his concern with
utility or even his insistence upon social as opposed to individual
utility, but was rather his conception of what fosters utility, of the
things that are useful. It was precisely his emphasis on the utility
of science and technology, combined with his relativistic notion of
the useful — which allowed that arrangements once useful could
cease to be such — that led Saint-Simon’s disciples to a critique of
private property.

Holding that under modem conditions private property was not

An Historical Model of Structural Development 91

conducive to the production of social utility, because private in-
heritance of property might result in management by incompe-
tents, the Saint-Simonians came to socialism. Far from opposing
utility, their “utopian socialism” led to a refined conception of
utility as a social standard, and they launched a critique of those
institutions that were held to impede utility.

The positivists and Utopians, in short, sought to extend and
socialize individualistic utilitarianism. While stressing the im-
portance of the economic, they sought to broaden the range of
things regarded as economically useful to include, and indeed to
center on, the vital significance of technolog)’ and science. Perhaps
also reflecting the somewhat distinctive tendency of many French
intellectuals, then as now, to combine an interest in science with
one in politics and art, Saint-Simon seems to have been determined
to rescue art from being warped by a narrowly economic valuation;
he found a legitimate (because useful) place for artists in the new
industrial society by proposing that they become engineers of the
soul and an inspiration to collective morale. In so doing, he con-
ceived art as an activity to be judged by its social utility. Saint-
Simon thus looked beyond the individual person or family to a
concern with what was useful for the larger society’s coherence or
solidarity.

SOCIOLOGY AS A COUNTERBALANCE TO
INDIVIDUALISTIC UTILITARIANISM

From its beginnings in nineteenth-century Positivism, sociology
was a counterbalance to the requirements of an individualistic
utilitarian culture. It emphasized the importance of “social” needs
neglected by, and required to resolve the tensions generated by, a
society that focused on individual utility. It was a theory to cover
what had been left out. The residual had to be added; as some
sociologists once said, sociology is an N+i science. In other words,
it was a theory of the complementary structures needed to make
whole the new utilitarian society. While critical of the deficiencies
of the new culture, the aim of Positivist Sociology was thus not to
overthrow it but rather to complete it. What was seen to be wrong
with society was the defective structure of the totality.

In its Positivist beginnings, the new social science entailed a
“cultural lag” theory. This explained current social tensions as a
symptom of the system as a whole, due either to the continued
existence of once functional but now archaic institutions, or to
the immaturity of the new industrial system that had emerged, but
as yet had failed to create appropriate new institutions in other
sectors. In short, the new society’s flaws were seen as those of an

g2 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

undeveloped adolescence rather than as the decrepitude of old age.

Saint-Simon, Comte, and, later, Durkheim contributed to a socio-
logical tradition that stressed the importance of developing shared
belief systems, common interests and wants, and stable social
groupings. It was expected that they would have a moral authority
strong enough to restrict the striving of competitive individualists
and provide them with anxiety-reducing group memberships. Tech-
nical activities would be controlled by guild-like professional associ-
ations that assumed a communal character, and personal life
would be regulated by institutionalized arrangements governed by
common values. These were to restore what had been “left out,”
and thus make society whole.

This response intended to counterbalance the operating code of
the new utilitarian economy, which, being concerned with the effi-
cient use and production of utilities for private gain, stressed un-
restricted individual competition, stripped men of group involve-
ments that limited their mobility, and transformed diem into
deployable “resources” — to be used when useful and discarded
when not — thus making them adaptable to an ever-changing tech-
nology. It was in part because the central emphasis of the sociolog}'
of the early nineteenth century focused on what the new utilitarian
culture had neglected and on the social problems generated by its
assumptions, that it then failed to win stable support from the
emerging middle class.

In fine, the newly emerging sociology' did not reject the utili-
tarian premises of the new middle-class culture, but rather sought
to broaden and extend them. It became concerned with collective
utility in contrast to individual utility, with the needs of society
for stability and progress, and with what was useful for this. In
particular, it stressed the importance of other, “social” utilities, as
opposed to an exclusive focus on the production of economic
utilities. Sociology was bom, then, as the counterbalance to the
political economy of the middle class in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century.

THE EXTRUSION OF THE ECONOMIC FROM THE SOCIAL

This historical development has had abiding consequences for
the place of sociology' in the scholarly and academic division of
labor. For the sociological focus was and remains centered on a
residual element in middle-class, utilitarian culture. Sociology made
the residual “social” element its sphere.

As it first emerged in Sociological Positivism, and, in particular,
in the work of Saint-Simon, it is clear that sociology’s historical
mission was to complete and culminate what it viewed as the still

An Historical Model of Structural Development 93

unfinished business of the emerging industrial revolution. Saint-
Simon thus expressly conceived of sociology as being needed in
order to extend the scientific outlook from the physical sciences to
the study of man, and thus approach man and society' in a manner
consistent with the emerging scientific revolution. For Saint-Simon,
sociology' was required to finish what die other disciplines and
physical sciences had still left undone. It was to be a culminating
addition to the new industrial outlook. It was, in this sense, to be
an N+i science.

This jV-tI conception always has had two somewhat different
implicadons. On the one hand, it involved focusing on intellectual
leftovers, on what was not studied by other disciplines. On the
other hand, it sometimes led sociologists to conceive of their disci-
pline as the “queen” of the social sciences, concerning itself with all
that the others do, and more; possessing a disdnedve concern with
the totality of sectors, with their incorporadon into a new and
higher level of integration, and with the unique laws of this higher
whole. This ambitious claim, however, was suitable to sociology
only when it was still outside the university before it had to com-
promise with the claims of other academic disciplines, which re-
garded such a conception of the sociological mission as, at best,
pretenuous and. at worst, intellectually imperialisdc.

As sociology adapted to the claims of other, more academically
entrenched disciplines, it sometimes found the more humble in-
terpretation of itself less provocadve. In this interpretation of itself,
and in its attendent scholarly practice and researches, sociology
often came to dwell on those concrete institutional areas and social
problems that were not already academically preempted: on the
family, ethnic groups, the urban community, on suicide, criminality,
divorce. In its scholarly practice sociology often became the study
of what u'as left over by other disciplines; it became a residual
discipline. But this soludon was neither intellectually nor profes-
sionally satisfying. On the theoretical level, sociology came in time
to conceive of and legitimate its place as an analytic discipline. It
conceived itself as characterized by its distinctive perspectives and
concerns, not in terms of the concrete subjects it studied. This
meant that, in principle, sociology could study any aspect of human
life, any institution, sector, group, or form of behavior, just as
economics could, the difference being the questions and interests
it had in them. For some sociologists of a later period, such as
Leopold von Wiese or Georg Simmel, this w r as taken to mean that
sociology’s domain was in the formal aspects of social relations and
processes; for example, in cooperation, succession, competition,
integration, conflict, or in dyads, triads, or rates of interaction. The
most fundamental of such formal concerns that moved to and re-

94 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

mained the center of the attention of academic sociologists — as it
had been for Western social theorists since Plato — is the problem
of social order: the nature and sources of social integration, co-
herence, and solidarity.

Sociolog}' thus remains concerned with society as a “whole” as
some kind of totality, but it now regards itself as responsible only
for one diviension of this totality. Society has been parceled out
analytically, among the various social sciences. From this analytic
standpoint, sociology is, indeed, concerned with social systems or
society as a “whole,” but only insofar as it is a social whole.

In theory sociology is now no different from, and certainly no
worse than, any other social science, each being characterized by a
distinctive analytic interest, its special way of angling into the
whole. In practice, however, the specific researches of sociology
still frequently focus on concretely different “topics,” or on those
concrete institutions or problems not traditionally encompassed by
other social disciplines. Sociology remains a residual science in its
practice, even if autonomous in its self-image as an analytic science
focused on the general problem of the integration of groups or
societies. There exists in actuality no getieral social science, but
only a set of unintegrated and specialized social sciences. (In the
academic social sciences there is nothing that corresponds to
Medicine. ) •

This means that Academic Sociology traditionally assumes that
social order may be analyzed and understood without making the
concerns of economics focal and problematic. It implies that the
problem of social order may be solved, practically and intellectually,
without clarifying and focusing on the problem of scarcity, with
which economics is so centrally concerned. Although aspects of
sociological analysis make tacit assumptions about scarcity, soci-
ology is an intellectual discipline that takes economics and eco-
nomic assumptions as givens, and that wishes or expects to solve
the problem of social order under any set of economic assumptions
or conditions. Sociology focuses upon the noneconomic sources of
soci&l order. Academic Sociology polemically denies that economic
change is a sufficient or necessary condition for maintaining or
increasing social order.

POSITIVIST GRAND THEORY AND THE RESTORATION STALEMATE

In the period of the Positivist synthesis, sociolog)' arose to form
a Grand Theory of society, with a distinctive and strong emphasis
upon the importance of studying society scientifically: with the
same “detached” manner as other sciences study their subject mat-

An Historical Model of Structural Development 95

ter, said Comte, neither praising nor blaming it. Positivism emerged
in France in the sprawling work of Henri Saint-Simon, following
the Revolution of 1789. It was systematized by Comte as a Grand
Theory during the Restoration, a time when, following the defeat
of Napoleon, the combined military might of the European aristoc-
racy was restoring the French nobility to its control of France.

In brief summary, Restoration social structure, as a matrix for
the crystallization of Sociological Positivism, involved the following
major factors: (1) a fundamental conflict between the restored
nobility and the middle class, involving basic characteristics of the
forthcoming society and the essential terms of settlement of the
Revolution; (2) despite their mutual opposition, each of the major
contending classes was somewhat ambivalent and uncertain of the
terms that it would settle for, and the nature of the social map that
it would support; that is, there were splits both within the nobility,
between moderates and ultras, and within the middle class; (3)
nevertheless, a great variety of basic issues were under contention;
the fundamental question of which group would control the larger
society was critical, because each was supporting a radically differ-
ent mapping of the total social order: (4) one of the oldest sources
of authoritative mapping under the old regime, traditional religion,
continued to lose much of its public support and credence, par-
ticularly as it gave renewed support to the restored nobility and
the Crown; (5) at the same time, science continued to develop and
to win public prestige.

It was out of these essential developments that there emerged
a set of collective public sentiments which was, on the one hand,
detached from both major contending social alternatives — old re-
gime traditionalism and middle-class liberalism — and, on the other,
expressed a need for a new social map to which men could attach
themselves; that is, for a positive set of beliefs. It was this new
structure of collective sentiment that Sociological Positivism con-
genially resonated and which, in part, enabled it to find public
support.

The program of an important section of the restored elite was
not merely a limited political one; divided more in tactics than
ultimate purpose, many among the old elite were bent upon trans-
forming the entire social world, and refracting it as far as they
could toward their traditional map of the ancient regime. They did
not seek piecemeal political reforms, but aimed at a fundamental
transformation of the larger social structure. What was at stake in
Restoration society, therefore, was not some specific political insti-
tution, not some piece of legislation or executive enactment, but
rather, the total network of institutions and the total culture that
had surfaced during and after the French Revolution.

g6 Sociolog}': Contradictions and Infrastructure

Important segments among die Royalists believed that their
newly restored political power depended for its stability on certain
economic and ideological conditions: they believed that their politi-
cal position could not be fundamentally stabilized without larger
changes in the total social structure. Thus, for instance, under
Villele, between 1822 and 1827, laws were passed for the indemnifi-
cation of the nobility and the preservation of primogeniture, both
aiming to restore the nobility’s socio-economic position. They also
enacted a law of sacrilege, attempted to abolish the Universite de
France, and proposed various laws bearing on the censorship of the
press.

Those among the middle class who wished to defend their newly
emerging institutions needed to respond on the same broad insti-
tutional level, with more than a political program that might guide
them from election to election; they were under pressure to de-
velop a coherent ideology about the social order as a totality. But
their own ambivalence toward the Revolution, their fears of renas-
cent Jacobinism and of the urban masses, blurred their vision of
what they wanted and blunted their political initiative. Moreover,
during the Restoration they were in no mood to share their own
newly acknowledged and severely restricted political privileges with
unpropertied groups. The people of the middle class thus had few
unequivocal conceptions about the nature of the social order they
wanted, except that it be constitutional in character, limited in
governmental powers, and laissez faire in policy. They had, one
might say, an image of the shell of a social order, but no firm view
of its content; their map of a desirable social order was largely
“negative,” focusing as it did on the maintenance of individual
freedom from political control.

This was a period when newly emerging social structures and
institutions, far from being taken for granted, were highly pre-
carious; moreover, this precariousness was a visible one, for the
contending views were subject to articulate public debate. The most
fundamental structures of society were at issue, and the debates
concerning them in the legislature were amplified in cafes, in
shops, and in homes. In the end, to some extent, each of the pow-
erful contenders nullified the other and undermined the full com-
mitment that might have been given to one or the other's concep-
tion of society.

Having once again clearly aligned itself with the nobility, the
traditional Church’s moral authority was further undermined
among the middle class. Thus one of die main forces, which might
have presented itself as a nonpartisan alternative and thus re-
solved the dilemma, had been deeply compromised. Many among
both the aristocracy and the middle class became increasingly

An Historical Model of Structural Development 97

sensitized to the political uses of religion, and a more instrumental
and detached view of religion developed. As George Brandes re-
marks: “In the seventeenth century man believed in Christianity,
in the eighteenth century they renounced and extirpated it,” and in
the nineteenth century, they looked at it “pathetically, gazing at it
from the outside, as one looks at an object in a museum.”' 1

Out of this growing detachment there developed, perhaps most
acutely among the young, a crisis of belief and a sensed need for
new positive beliefs. As Madame de Stael remarked: “I do not know
exactly what we must believe, but I believe that we must believe!
The eighteenth century did nothing but deny. The human spirit
lives by its beliefs. Acquire faith through Christianity, or through
German philosophy, or merely through enthusiasm, but believe in
something.” 4 Here, as in other matters, de Stael was a sensitive
weathervane, articulating some of the surfacing collective senti-
ments that Sociological Positivism, then emerging, would express.
Positivism would stress the importance of positive beliefs, counter-
posing them to the negativism of the Enlightenment, as well as
advocating a new “religion of humanity.”

The period, then, was characterized by a sensed detachment
from traditional beliefs and by an expressed need for new ones.
Moreover, by 1824, there was a rising new generation, which, by
that time, constituted a majority of the European population. They
were deeply attached neither to the ideologies of the Revolution nor
to those of the counterrevolution, for these had little rooting in
their own personal experience. Lacking the loyalties or the bitter-
ness of those who had played a role in the Revolution as adults,
the new generation was not moved by the old slogans. They feared
neither revolution nor reaction quite as personally as had their
parents.

At the same time, the new generation was being exposed to
educational institutions increasingly favorable toward the rapid
development of science. For example, science was being pursued
and taught at the College de France, Faculte des Sciences, the
Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, and Ecole Polytechnique. New sci-
entific journals were being established, and science and philosophy
were being separated both in France and Germany. There was a
growing interaction between science and industry; engineering was
emerging as a systematic application of science to industry. The
belief was taking hold that there was a single scientific method
applicable to all fields of study. The growing prestige of science
began, in part, to substitute for the attenuation of traditional
religion, and science came to attract those who felt a need for a
new and general belief system.

The early nineteenth century had been an emotionally exhaust-

g8 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

ing quarter-century of revolution and war, and this was com-
pounded by the failure, during the Restoration stalemate, authori-
tatively to resolve the most basic issues concerning the social order.
The Revolution had deeply undermined the older religious faith,
and the political partisanship of the Church under the Restoration
had done little to restore confidence in its moral authority. At the
same time, however, the Revolution itself was coming to be seen
by many in the middle class from its negative, irrational side, as a
time of anxiety and bloodshed. Many thus experienced detachment
from both of the dominant alternatives. To many, also, the emerg-
ing world of peaceful bourgeois routine was bloodless and uninspir-
ing. There was need of a faith that could endow life with a new
meaning, and restore a sense of commitment and involvement.
The new generation, then, had a capacity for detachment, on the
one side, and a readiness for a stimulating new belief system on
the other. Both these sentiments were essentially akin to the stand-
point of the Sociological Positivism then developing: the new struc-
ture of collective sentiments was congenially resonated by and ex-
pressed in the new sociology that extolled scholarly detachment
even as it offered a new religion. The new theory was borne by a
new infrastructure.

Neither the old regime, with its traditional beliefs, nor the anti-
traditional Enlightenment rationalism was sufficient to anchor
personal convictions. Both were out of keeping with the personal
reality that many now experienced. Now, after twenty-five years of
dramatic upheavals, of adrenalizing adventure, of history-making
involvements, the return of peace was, for some, depiessing: life
seemed drab and meaningless.

What these individuals sought was a belief system that would
endow the present with drama and color, would invest it with deep
transcendental meaning that would not pale when compared with
earlier enthusiasms and solidarities, and which would enable it to
take on a drama of its own. In short, what was needed was an
ideology that, on the one side, romanticized the present, and on the
other, was compatible with the new world-view of science. What
was needed was a view that was both romantic and scientific. What
also was needed was an alternative to the traditional map of the
social world, which had been destroyed by the Revolution and,
because of the middle class’s disillusionment about revolutionary
terror and its abiding fear of Jacobinism, not been replaced. With
the Thermidorean reaction, the middle class had begun to hedge on
its own vision of the world and the future, and had no clear
position. It was in this social context that Sociological Positivism
developed.

The breakdown of the old regime’s old social mappings had

An Historical Model of Structural Development gg

these three aspects: (i) the attenuation of the traditional image
of the social order, the specific kinds of social identities it had
established, the objects it had valued, and their relationships with
one another; (2) the failure of the traditional sources of authorita-
tive map-making, most especially with the weakening of the
Church’s social influence; (3) the problem of map-making meth-
ods. One massive, multifaceted response to the breakdown of the
old social mappings was a surge of new, comprehensive map-
making efforts on different levels and in different quarters of
society. For example, on the state level there was constitution-
making. a comprehensive legal effort to order, specify, and give
fixity to a social order in minutely legislated detail. From another
direction there was "utopian socialism,” the socialism of Fourier,
Cabet, and the Saint-Simonians, which presented its image of a
counter-social order in plans of equally minute detail. Utopian
comprehensiveness, we might say, was the emerging Left’s map-
making counterpart to constitutionalism, while constitutionalism
was the map-making utopianism of the liberal middle class. In
addition there was Sociological Positivism itself, whose compre-
hensive map-making took two distinct forms: systematic or Grand
Social Theory, as in Comte's work, and the "religion of humanity,”
with its minutely specified catechisms and holidays and its detailed
ritual and symbolism.

Sociological Positivism was related to the breakdown of tradi-
tional social mappings in one unique way. This was expressed in
its sense of the irrelevance of all the dominant social mappings
then available, and in its consequent search for a new method of
social mapping. Hostile to lawyers and "metaphysicians," it sought
for new elites that could authoritatively establish the new social
maps. For Positivism, the new map-making authorities were to be
scientists, technologists, and industrials. Its new way of making
maps for the social world was to be science.

Much the same map-making problem was then being confronted
by the German Romantics, but they did not define map-making as
a cognitive, rational, or scientific effort; they viewed it as a feat of
imagination and spirit. Thus the new map-making elite that the
Romantics favored was not scientists hut poets and, more generally,
artists. But whether scientists or artists, Western Europe was seek-
ing a new elite to fill the vacuum and provide an authoritative
source of new social mappings. It would be utterly wrong, there-
fore, to think of French Positivism and of Romanticism (German
or French) as two entirely separate or mutually isolated responses
to the map-making crisis of the time. To see this, one need only
remember de Stael's enthusiasm for the German Romantics and
the French response to her study of them in her book on Germany, 8

100

Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

For that matter, we might also recall Saint-Simon’s grand offer to
marry de Stael, Saint-Simonianism’s search for la femme libre and
its attraction to “free love,” or, again, the religion of humanity it-
self. French Positivism was a blend of science and Romanticism,
a “scientism,” but nevertheless it was a blend in which the scientific
element was focal and dominant.

French Sociological Positivism resonated an emerging structure
of collective sentiments, in which the world was seen to need new
mappings because the moral commitment to the traditional social
maps had been weakened while the prestige of science was grow-
ing. Positivism was a response to the moral uncertainty and moral
exhaustion of the Restoration. It sought to escape from the Restora-
tion stalemate between the nobility and the middle class. Against
the clash of right against right, Positivism affirmed the propriety
of an amoral response to the social world; it stressed the value of
knowledge about society and universalized this moral escape by
transforming its amoral method for making social maps into a
moral rule. B LO °i€SU%

On one of its sides, then, Positivism called for a new, practical,
useful, and amoral social science as a tool for making social maps.
It would not merely “moralize” about what society should be; it
would find out what it was and would be, and, on this basis, would
found its new morality. In this methodological posture. Positivism
constituted a delaying tactic, implicitly calling for a moratorium on
all the map-making that was then going on, a delay that would in
effect be indefinite or would presumably extend until Positivism
could, through its new methodology, create a new social map.
Positivism was conforming to a structure of exhausted sentiments
that said, in effect, a plague on both your houses : upon bourgeois
and Restorationist, upon feudal traditionalist and middle-class
liberal, upon Royalist and Jacobin.

Yet, the Positivists were also infused with utilitarian sentiments
that brought them close to a middle-class outlook and led them
to expect and to seek middle-class support. This was, in the end,
withheld; so, while the Positivists were drawn to the middle class,
they were not pulled fully into its orbit, for they resented the middle
class’s failure to appreciate and support them. Underlying and
exacerbating Positivism’s detachment, was its disappointment with
and resentment of the propertied middle class. To the degree that
the middle class withheld active support from them, the Positivists
had little choice but to be “above the struggle.” Not wishing and not
forced to choose among alternatives, what Positivism made sacred,
therefore, was not the map itself, but the rules for making it, a
methodology. In this distinctive way. Positivism was a social move-
ment that uniquely stressed the possibility of living in the world

101

An Historical Model of Structural Development

without a map, with the use only of a method and the sheer in-
formation it produced.

This, at any rate, was one distinctive emphasis of Positivism;
but there was another, directly contrary, which led it to produce a
detailed and "positive” map of the social world. This was Posi-
tivism’s religion of humanity, for which both Comte and Saint-
Simon had designed highly specific blueprints. This utopian aspect
of Positivism was the future-oriented counterpart to the backward-
looking historical novel of the Romantics; in both, social worlds
were being designed and mapped in imaginative detail, and offered
as alternatives to the present.

From the beginning, Positivism entailed this deepgoing conflict:
the “Positive” meant on the one side, that men should base their
map-making upon the certainties of science, and, on the other, that
they should be not only critical, but also for some specific concep-
tion of how the world should be. In its first, methodological posture.
Positivism counseled patience and warned of premature commit-
ments to social reconstruction. In its second, religion-of-humanity
stance, Positivism eschewed "negativism” and forthwith produced
a new map of the world. To meet the problem in Restoration society
of the loss of the traditional faith, Positivism offered a new re-
ligion of humanity.

The study of society, and especially the call for a detached sci-
entific method of studying society, was bom of an effort to find an
apolitical alternative to political conflicts over the fundamental
character of society. As such. Positivism was congenial to those
among whom science had prestige, especially educated sectors of
the middle class, and who sought a prudent way of producing social
change — progress within order, skirting political conflict so as not
to risk the mobilization of uncontrollable allies, the radical Jacobin
potential, and simultaneously to minimize the reactionary, Restora-
tionist backlash.

The dissonance between these two sides of Positivism began to
be reduced by the factional differentiation that emerged among the
various disciples of the fountainhead of Positivism, Saint-Simon.
Following Saint-Simon’s death, two distinguishable groupings soon
formed. One of these, centering around Enfantin and Bazard, ul-
timately syncretized with Hegelianism in Germany — in the work of
Marx’s teacher, Eduard Gans, among others — and contributed to
the development of Marxism. Another faction, centering around
Comte, ultimately eventuated in Academic Sociology.

One of the ways in which these two factions differed was in
respect to their conception of science itself. Enfantin and Bazard
had a rather Romantic appreciation of the actively creative role of
hypothesis, intuition, and “genius” in the process of knowing. In

102 Sociolog}': Contradictions and Infrastructure

brief, they saw science as a "lamp” rather than a "mirror,” em-
bodying active forces akin to those that the German Romantics
regarded as the source of poetry and art. This positivistic grouping
also had a more politically activistic component than Comtianism.

When the Comtian faction failed utterly in its efforts to win
acceptance for its new map, its religion of humanity, it gave up
this effort and became increasingly concerned with the methodol-
ogy of map-making rather than with the map to be made. Academic
Sociology, in its Positivistic heritage, thus emerges from the failure
of Comtianism as a practical social movement for cultural recon-
struction. Viewed historically, in relation to the Positivist’s own
aspirations, modem “value free” sociology is the anomic adaptation
of Sociological Positivism to political failure, an adaptation that
commonly takes a ritualistic form, in which pure knowledge or the
methodology of map-making tends to become an end in itself. Con-
tinually striving to be “above the conflict,” it serves as a refuge for
those seeking an apolitical alternative to the dominant images of
society that are in conflict. The specifically Positivistic aspect of
modem sociology has a political taproot: the failure of middle-class
politics to yield a coherent image of the new social order.

DETACHMENT AND OBJECTIVITY

Utilitarian culture, in its confluence with the Restoration crisis,
had fostered acute sentiments of detachment. Positivism trans-
formed this detachment into an ideology and morality. Detach-
ment was the characterological foundation of the morality of ob-
jectivity, while Positivist objectivity envalued the sentiment of
detachment. Objectivity, as a value, prescribed and articulated a
detachment that the detached self already felt: ought implied can.
The Positivistic demand for objectivity resonated the sense of
detachment fostered by a utilitarian culture, in which a sense of the
intrinsic value of objects was being undermined by the shifting
appraisal of consequences fostered by market conditions. In a
market economy, intrinsic object attachments impede buying and
selling; here, whether men keep or sell any object depends ulti-
mately on the price offered for it. If they will sell themselves, their
time and their services, for a price, there are few things they will
balk at selling when the price is right. In such a culture, there is,
therefore, less of a strain in the demand that men be “objective.”

A concern with the usefulness and marketability of things crip-
ples our ability to love them, and hence to feel loving. There is a
negative dialectic between use and love, each one impeding the
other. No one sensed this with a surer instinct than the Romantics,

An Historical Model of Structural Development 103

who counterposed passionate and personal love to detached and
impersonal use; who held, as Goethe had, Gefiihl ist alles; or who
claimed, in Werner Sombart’s pointed antithesis : “Either economic
interests, in the broadest sense, or love interests, form the central
point of all of life’s importance. One lives either to work or else to
love. Work implies saving, love implies spending.” 11 “Objectivity” is
the compensation men offer themselves when their capacity to
love has been crippled. Thus those who wish to speak in praise of
objectivity often know no better way of doing so than to denounce
“sentimentality.”

On this level, such objectivity is not neutrality, but alienation
from self and society; it is an alienation from a society experienced
as a hurtful and unlovable thing. Objectivity is the way one comes
to terms and makes peace with a world one does not like but will
not oppose; it arises when one is detached from the status quo but
reluctant to be identified with its critics, detached from the dom-
inant map of social reality as well as from meaningful alternative
maps. “Objectivity” transforms the nowhere of exile into a positive
and valued social location; it transforms the weakness of the in-
ternal “refuge” into the superiority of principled aloofness. Ob-
jectivity is the ideology of those who are alienated and politically
homeless.

In suggesting that objectivity is the ideology of those who reject
both the conventional and the alternative mappings of the social
order, I do not, however, mean to suggest that they are equally
distant from both; commonly, these “objective” men, even if politi-
cally homeless, are middle class and operate within the boundaries
of the social status quo. In some part they tolerate it because they
fear conflict and want peace and security, and know they would be
allowed considerably less of both if they did not tolerate it.

Let me put the matter in another way: sociology emerged in
the Restoration conflict, when, as de Stael said, men had lost their
traditional beliefs and felt a need to believe in something. It
emerged as an objective and detached study of society because
traditional values had broken down and there were no firmly
delineated alternatives. The soil on which sociology grew was
manured by a pervasive anomie. The objectivity of Sociological
Positivism arose when men entertained the suspicion that the
world in which they lived was passion-spent and had little in it
worth living or dying for.

Fundamental to the alienation they experienced was the split in
the universe: the cleavage between power and morality. The old
patterns of legitimacy were losing or had lost potency, while the
emerging locus of power, the new bourgeoisie, had only the thin-
nest and most dubious legitimacy. One of the most paradoxical

104 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

characteristics of modem culture is its abiding contempt for the
middle class: the very term “bourgeois” has always had an in-
eradicable edge of derision to it. Sociology and the Positivist de-
mand for objectivity emerged when traditional and middle-class
values were, in the first case, unworkable, and, in the second,
unheroic or uninspiring.

The Positivist sociologists tried to mend this split between power
and morality in various ways. For one, they held that morality
could grow out of knowledge of social reality. For a second, they
attempted to shore up morality through the religion of humanity.
Most important of all, however, and out of an abiding conviction
about the corrupting consequences of power, they proposed to
separate the “temporal” and “spiritual” orders and constitute them
as insulated realms. They did this, in large measure, because they
wanted to protect their spiritual order and certain values in it.
They wanted to preserve their objectivity and their “dignity”; they
did not want to be put to meanly practical uses. While die Pos-
itivists proposed to educate and refine the moral sensibility of the
new men of power, they intended to do so only from a protected
distance. They really did not like these men, if for no other reason
than that they were neglected and unappreciated by them. Yet
they were ready to use them if they could, and, correspondingly,
they were ready to be used — “consulted,” in a manner befitting their
dignity — and they waited patiently to be discovered. In short, they
proposed what was, in effect, a deal: they were to be treated with
respect and left in charge of their own spiritual order, and in re-
turn they would respect the temporal order as it was, although still
attempting to uplift it: they would render unto Caesar. That was
the political meaning of Positivism’s objectivity.

Even today the value-free, high science sociology that is the
heir of Positivism, serves to defocalize the ideological dimensions
of decision-making, diverting attention from differences in ultimate
values and from die more remote consequences of the social poli-
cies to which its research is harnessed. It is congenial, therefore,
to an “engineering” or managerial position, in which the client
specifies the ends to be pursued while the sociologist provides the
means or appraises only their efficacy. Classical Positivism mani-
fested a clear drift in this direction from its inception. Such a con-
ception of the sociological task does not require, and is indeed dis-
sonant with, the more comprehensive, more assertively ideological
social mappings of Grand Theory; it seeks, instead, specific knowl-
edge about limited social sectors and requires intensive research
for acquiring it. The contradiction between Positivism’s scientific
ambitions and its map-making impulses remained relatively in-

An Historical Model of Structural Development 105

visible during its classical period, in part because there was then
little support provided by the middle class for intensive social re-
search.

As such funding becomes increasingly available, the emphasis
on rigorous methodologies assumes a very special rhetorical func-
tion. It serves to provide a framework for resolving limited dif-
ferences among the managers of organizations and institutions,
who have little conflict about basic values or social mappings, by
lending the sanction of science to limited policy choices concern-
ing ways and means. At the same time, its cognitive emphasis
serves to defocalize the conflict of values that remains involved in
political differences, and to focus contention on questions of fact,
implying that the value conflict may be resolved apart from
politics and without political conflict. Positivism thus continues to
serve as a way of avoiding conflicts about mapping. Yet, despite
this seemingly neutral, nonpartisan character. Positivism’s social
impact is not random or neutral in regard to competing social
mappings; because of its emphasis on the problem of social order,
because of the social origins, education, and character of its own
personnel, and because of the dependencies generated by its own
funding requirements, it persistently tends to lend support to the
status quo.

POSITIVISM: BETWEEN RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION

The middle-class society that had, as in France, broken through
the old regime, clearly understood that the danger to its further
development lay, in important part, in the continued resistance of
old institutions and elites. The practical political task confronting
the middle class entailed the protection of its newly won positions,
against the restoration of the old regime, which it identified with
social forces of the historical past. In sort, old elites were still seen
as consequential in the present; their continuing power was con-
demned as illegitimate on the grounds of their present social use-
lessness, as in Saint-Simon’s parable.

The early Sociological Positivists, like many among the emerging
middle class, sensed that the past was still alive and dangerous,
and they expressed this feeling in a “cultural lag” theory. They con-
ceived of the present as embodying certain tensionful contradic-
tions, which they viewed not as within and inherent to the new
bourgeois institutions, but rather as conflicts that existed between
them and older, “archaic” institutions lingering on from the past.
These contradictions were expected to resolve themselves in the
course of social evolution. In this, the archaic past would wither

io6 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

away, and the new society would be completed by the rounding-out
of its institutional requirements and by developing new institutions
appropriate to those middle-class arrangements that had already
emerged.

At the same time that the middle class sought to strengthen its
new position in society against the older elites, it also found itself
confronted with a newly emerging proletariat, the urban masses,
who seized upon middle-class revolutionary militancy to advance
their own interests. The middle class was thus constrained, to
inhibit its own revolutionary initiatives, for fear that it would be
unable to control the emerging masses. There was, in short, the
Thermidorean reaction.

The nineteenth-century middle class was soon in the position of
having to pursue its interests by waging a social struggle on two
fronts. Change had to be tempered with a prudent concern for
social order, political continuity, and stability. The middle class’
need to complete its revolution, on the one hand, and its simul-
taneous need to protect its position and property from urban dis-
order and proletarian unrest, on the other, help to account for
August Comte’s twofold slogan, “Order and Progress,” and his
conception of progress as the unfolding of order. Comte’s evolu-
tionary, prophetical sociology held that what was required for
completion of the new society was not revolution but, rather, the
peaceful application of science and knowledge: Positivism. Comte’s
sociology reflected the middle class’ impulse to fortify its new social
position against restoration from above, while avoiding the risks
of revolution from below. The new sociology resonated the senti-
ments of a middle class precariously caught between past and
future, between still powerful old elites and emerging new masses.

As suggested earlier, the middle class failed at first to support
the new sociology, even though it coincided with their needs and
perspectives in some respects. They backed away from it partially
because it was critical of their narrowly economic and individual-
istic version of utilitarianism. Moreover, in focusing attention on
sociological structure, sociology tended to diminish the importance
attributed to the state. At a time when the middle class was still
involved in a struggle for control of the governmental apparatus,
Comte had hardly anything to say about the state.

The Positivistic Sociology of the early nineteenth century was
not the intellectual creation of the propertied middle class. Its
ground-work, rather, was initially laid by the dispossessed aristoc-
racy, including the Counts DeBonald, DeMaistre, and Saint-Simon;
their ideas were fused with a concern with “science” attractive to
the civic, and especially the engineering, professions then emerging.
Sociology was thus at first the intellectual product of old strata

An Historical Model of Structural Development 107

that had lost their social power and of new ones that were still far
from fully developed. The intellectual concerns and cultural tradi-
tions of these strata were not identical with the needs of bourgeois
property; the noble antecedents as well as the superior education
of the men who created the new sociology gave them a sense of
their superiority, which troubled the new, often vulgar, men of
money. In large measure, the new sociology of Saint-Simon and
Comte was the product of a marginal social strata, of those dying
or still not fully born. It also won the support of stigmatized groups,
like the Jews, and from persons with various individual stigmata,
such as pronounced mental illness, marriage to prostitutes, bank-
ruptcy, or bastardy.

' These men were commonly viewed with profound discomfort by
the propertied middle class. They were disreputables, who had
publicly declared themselves for “free love.” They were men of
dangerous character, who were bundled off to jail and prosecuted.
The arriviste, the still socially and politically insecure middle class
of the early nineteenth century, was not about to ally itself -with
such men or their sociology. Moreover, the rising middle class did
not relish being told, by advocates of the new sociology, that it was
science and technology, rather than property, that legitimated
authority in the modem world. The middle class had not fought
the aristocracy and disestablished the powerful Church, only to be
yoked by a seedy little sect. Comte would wait in vain.

It was only as industrialism deepened its hold on society that
sociology would come into its own. Only where and when the
institutional requirements of commercial industrialism were fully
established; only when the middle class was secure from the resto-
ration of old elites; only when it therefore did not look upon the
past as a threat and did not believe the future required anything
radically different: only then could the middle class relinquish a
cultural lag theory that explained away present social tensions as
due to old institutions grown archaic. These were among the
necessary conditions for the acceptance and institutionalization of
sociology in middle-class society.

Sociology could then relinquish its historical and evolutionary
perspectives, curtail its future-orientedness, and live upon the
knife-edge of an isolated present. By the classical period, evolution-
ism began to give way to “comparative” studies and to Function-
alism. Functional sociology, with its ahistorical character and its
emphasis upon the ongoing consequences of existent social arrange-
ments, reflects the loss of historical imagination that corresponds
to the mature entrenchment of the middle class, which no longer
fears the past and neither imagines nor desires a future radically
different from the present. Thus, modem, functional social theory

10S Sociolog) - : Contradictions and Infrastructure

and sociolog)- itself are, at first, largely the product of those societies
where middle-class industrialization moved ahead most rapidly:
that is, France, England, and, above all, the United States.

PERIOD II: MARXISM

Bom of and in capitalism, no less than in a struggle against it,
popular, politically powerful, Marxism also placed a central value
on social utility, even though it polemicized against Benthamite
utilitarianism. From an historical perspective, one function of
popular Marxism was to complete the utilitarian revolution by
overcoming the obstacle that bourgeois property presented to the
further extension of standards of utility. It is this which, in part,
contains the historically “progressive content” of Marxism. Popular
Marxism was not, of course, alone among socialisms to commit it-
self to a form of popular utilitarianism, as may be gleaned from
H. G. Wells’ biting criticism of Beatrice Webb, she of the “bony
soul.”

On the level of publicly affirmed and genuinely believed values,
there is no difference in principle between capitalism and socialism
with respect to the slogan: from each according to his ability, to
each according to his work. The “honest bourgeois” would agree:
men should work hard and to the best of their ability; and they
should in turn be paid in full what their work is worth.

THE SOCIAL UTILITARIANISM OF MARXISM

Socialist and bourgeois would disagree, however, with respect
to the exclusive use of utility as a standard for determining what
men receive. Commonly, socialists felt that men’s needs, as well as
their usefulness, were a legitimate basis for allocating goods and
services to them. While insisting that men’s wants were corrupted
under capitalism, Marx believed that men had certain universal
“species needs” as humans, and that, as socialism matured, they
would develop more truly human needs. Marx and other socialists
believed that men’s claims to gratification were ultimately rooted in
these needs, and not simply in their usefulness.

On the one hand, Marx, like the Utopian Socialists, acknowl-
edged utility as a standard, and, indeed, sought to overcome im-

An Historical Model of Structural Development 109

pediments to its historical development; he sought to socialize
utility. On the other hand, he also sought to balance and temper
utility with considerations of human need, even during periods of
early industrial development, in the anticipation that utility would
be transcended when economic development had vastly increased
productivity; and then human needs, no longer corrupted by venal
motives, could become more truly human.

Let me be at great pains to insist that Marx’s position about
utilitarianism was very complex and that it is mistaken to interpret
him as an exponent of traditional utilitarianism. Nothing can make
this complexity clearer than the polemic Marx mounted against
Jeremy Bentham, that “insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle
of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth
century.” 7 Yet to understand Marx’s polemical position on utili-
tarianism, its strengths and its limitations, it is vital to see his
assumptions.

First, Marx insisted that we cannot talk about utility in general,
but only about utility for something:

To know what is useful for a dog, we must study dog nature [and]
. . . he who would pass judgment upon all human activities, move-
ments, relations, etc., in accordance with the principle of utility, must
first become acquainted with human nature in general, and then with
human nature as modified in each specific historical epoch . 8

Thus Marx insisted that we cannot tell whether anything is useful
to man without having a general, universal conception of human
nature, as well as an historical conception of it. Second, Marx
clearly took exception to the reductionistic aspects of utilitarianism,
insisting on the autonomy of expressive as well as other motives.
This is especially evident in his German Ideology, where he con-
demns efforts to reduce all the various forms of human activity —
“speech, love, etcetera” — to a relation with utility in which they are
not supposed "to have a meaning peculiar to them.” Men sometimes
“use" things as means to other ends, in an instrumental manner,
but not under all conditions. Third, Marx condemned Bentham’s
version of utilitarianism because it tacitly premised that what is
useful for the English bourgeois is useful to all men. “Whatever
seems useful to this queer sort of normal man, is regarded as
useful in and of itself.” 9 Finally, and central to his analysis of
capitalism, is Marx’s view of utilitarianism as an ideology of the
bourgeoisie. Although the bourgeoisie talks about utility, he really
means profit, Marx says. The bourgeoisie does not really produce
what is useful but what is profitable, what sells. Bourgeois produc-
tion is commodity production: that is, the production of things that

Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

have “exchange-value,” not “use-value.” Utilitarianism is a false
consciousness of the bourgeoisie, a congenial disguise for its
venality.

At bottom, then, Marx’s critique of utilitarianism centers on its
limited bourgeois form; his is an attack upon the pursuit of in-
dividual private profit, underneath which is the more classical
hostility toward egoism. For Marx, utilitarianism is largely in-
dividual egoism, or the modern disguise of it. Marx therefore does
not generalize his critique to all forms of utilitarianism but centers
it on the bourgeois form. As early as his youthful paper at the
Triers Gymnasium, Marx committed himself to a kind of social
utilitarianism, to the importance of being useful to humanity. He
remarked there that one must choose a vocation “in which we can
contribute most to humanity,” and he warned that unless we choose
vocations for which we are talented, “we will be useless creatures.”

Marx is a “revisionist” utilitarian, a social utilitarian; he wants
men to be useful to the collectivity, to society as a whole, to what
was emerging in history. In his well-known, and deliberately slogan-
istic, characterization of advanced socialism, where he demands,
“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his
needs,” Marx is, on the one hand, severing the conventional utili-
tarian correlation between work and reward, but on the other hand,
he is also implying that men have a moral obligation to be useful
to a humane, socialist society. What Marx rejects in Benthamite
utilitarianism is precisely its instrumental calculation and expedi-
ence; what Marx washes is a noncalculating, moral utilitarianism,
where men feel a genuine obligation to be useful to a decent
society.

This is a somewhat tensely fine line between Marx’s con-
demnation of individualistic and venal utilitarianism, and his
accommodation to a socialized and communal utilitarianism. In some
part, this tension was resolved by assigning a different importance
to utility in different periods of economic development, holding that
it would be ultimately obsolescent under fully developed socialism,
where the rule would be, from each according to his abilities, to
each according to his need; in earlier, less developed socialism,
utility would hold greater sway, and the rule would be, from each
according to his abilities, to each according to his w r ork.

The historical outcome was paradoxical. On the one hand, social-
ists came to view utility as an historically transient and increasingly
archaic standard, ultimately destined for the historical rubbish
heap; even its current legitimacy was ambiguous and undermined.
On the other hand, however, the practical exigencies of successful
industrialization and nation-building often led socialists to apply
utilitarian standards in daily politics and economic planning, and

An Historical Model of Structural Development m

the transcendence of utility as a social standard tended to assume
a millennial character.

Marxism thus tacitly embodied the conflict between utilitarian-
ism and natural rights that had been characteristic of the middle
class, even though it was hostile to commercial paradigms of utility
and critical of the universal claims of natural rights. Marx himself
had envisaged the good society that would ultimately appear as
one that severed the correlation between a man’s usefulness and
what he would get; what a man received would no longer be a
reward for his usefulness but his birthright as an individual. This,
however, was the Marxist image of the future, not the operating
standard of the existing socialist movement. Marxism then was
ambivalent about utilitarianism; seeking to transcend it in the
future, it accommodated to it in the present; opposed to a venal,
individualistic utilitarianism, it still accepted the necessity of a
social utilitarianism.

THE BINARY FISSION OF MARXISM AND ACADEMIC SOCIOLOGY

A major structural characteristic of Western Sociology develops
after the emergence of Marxism; following this. Western Sociology
is divided into two camps, each with its own continuous intellectual
tradition and distinctive intellectual paradigms, and each greatly
insulated from or mutually contemptuous of the other. After the
sprawling genius of Saint-Simon, Western Sociology underwent a
kind of “binary fission” into two sociologies, each differentiated
from the other both theoretically and institutionally, and each the
reverse or. mirror image' of the other. One was Comte’s program
for a “pure” sociology, which, in time, became Academic Sociology,
the university sociology of the middle class, that achieved its fullest
institutional development in the United States. The other was the
sociology of Karl Marx, or Marxism, the party sociology of intel-
lectuals oriented toward the proletariat, which achieved its greatest
success in Eastern Europe.

Rather than defining itself as a “pure” sociology, as Comte had
come to define Positivistic Sociology, Marxism affirmed the “unity
of theory and practice." Far from appealing to the middle class, as
Comte had, Marxism found its constituency not in classes that were
rapidly being integrated into the new middle-class society, but in
strata that were still outsiders, marginal to it, lowly, disreputable,
relatively powerless, and still very far from enjoying the benefits
of the new society. In this last respect, Marxism made the most
basic rupture with all previous social theory, which, from Plato to
Machiavelli, had addressed itself to and sought the support of

1X2 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

Princes, elites, and socially integrated strata. Marxism took the
decisive step when it rejected Saint-Simon’s proletarian philan-
thropy, which provides help from the outside, and opted instead
for proletarian initiative and proletarian self-determination.

Marxism was no less one-sided than the “positivistic trash” it
deplored, but it did develop precisely those interests that Comte
had neglected. Instead of conceiving of society, as Comte had, as
tending naturally toward stability and order, it regarded modern
society as containing “the seeds of its own destruction.” Rather than
concerning itself with social stability, Marxism conceived of social
reality as process; it sought both to understand and to produce
social change. Instead of being in love with order and stability,
Marxism — at least in its early, prerevisionist stages — had an am-
plified sensitivity to the sounds of street-fighting. It did not center
attention on small “natural” groups, such as the family, that Comte
believed would spontaneously maintain social order; Marxism
focused on large social classes whose conflicts disrupted social
order, and on planned associations, such as political parties and
trade unions, which could rationally modify the social world in ac-
cordance with the guidance of a social science. Marxism exalted
work, knowledge, and involvement; Comtianism prized morality,
knowledge, and scientific detachment. The Comtian formula was:
Scientific Method x Hierarchical Metaphysics = Positive Sociology;
the Marxian formula was: Scientific Method x Romantic Meta-
physics = Scientific Socialism.

Marx accented the economic and industrial focus already present
in Saint-Simon, but he conceptualized it as a matter of economics
and power rather than of science and technology. Saint-Simon’s
position on this had developed as early as 1803, when he had ex-
pressly argued that “the haves govern the have-nots, [but] not
because they own property; they own property and govern because,
collectively, they are superior in enlightenment to the have-nots.” 10
Marx, of course, came to maintain the very opposite. Marx saw
modern society as “capitalist,” in contrast to Saint-Simon’s concep-
tion of it as “industrial.” Marx thus centered attention on the vari-
ability of property and power arrangements, and their importance
for the further development of industrialization. Marx also focused
on the conflicts within the new industrial classes rather than on
their common interest in opposing the elites of the old regimes, as
had Saint-Simon. Where Saint-Simon had stressed their similarities
as industrials, Marx split them into proletarians and capitalists.

Comtianism and Academic Sociology became the sociology and
ideology of strata and societies that made the first and quickest
breakthroughs into industrialization. Marxism became the sociology
adopted by underdeveloped or more slowly developing regions, by

An Historical Model of Structural Development 113

strata least integrated into industrial societies, by classes who
sought but were denied their benefits.

Saint-Simon’s doctrines thus underwent a binary fission into
two basic theoretical systems that persist until this day. One side
of Saint-Simon’s work went to his French disciples, Enfantin and
Bazard; there it became “Saint-Simonism,” which, when fused with
the infrastructures of German Romanticism and Hegelianism, con-
tributed to the development of Marxism, in the work of Marx,
Engels, Karl Kautsky, Nicolai Bukharin, Leon Trotsky, and V. I.
Lenin; and, where it renewed its contact with Hegelianism, it was
expressed in the work of Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, and in
the contemporary German School of “Critical Sociology” at Frank-
furt, including Herbert Marcfise, Theodor Adorno, Max Hork-
heimer, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm, and Jurgen Habermas. Thus
one side of Western Sociology’s binary fission produced a protean
tradition whose persistent theme has been a criticism of modem
society in the name of man’s human potentialities and their fulfill-
ment. The other side of this fission at first crystallized as Positivistic
Sociology, which provided the roots of conventional Academic Soci-
ology, as it passed from Comte through Emile Durkheim and
English anthropology, to become one of the central sources that
Talcott Parsons was to draw upon for his own theoretical synthesis.
This continuing tradition of Academic Sociology has, as its per-
during theme, the need for social order and moral consensus.

POSITIVISM AND SUBSEQUENT FUNCTIONAJLISM

Modern Functionalism, which emerges later, in the third and
fourth periods of sociological synthesis, has part of its heritage in
Sociological Positivism. While modern Functionalism renounces
certain assumptions important to earlier Positivism, particularly its
evolutionism and cultural lag theory. Functionalism has always
remained loyal to Positivism’s central “programmatic concept” — a
concern with the “positive” functions of institutions — and, more-
over, to certain of the core sentiments adhering to it. The term
“positive” is a resonating programmatic concept, like those found
at the heart of all major social theories. To grasp the programmatic
concept, to see its fundamental domain assumptions and the senti-
ments that permeate it, is to grasp much of the power, pathos, and
appeal of the theory.

To Saint-Simon and to Comte the “positive” had at least two
central implications; on the one side, the “positive” referred to the
certain, to knowledge certified by science; on the other, it was the
opposite of the “negative,” that is, of the "critical” and "destructive”

H4 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

ideas of the French Revolution and the philosophes. In line with
the latter, Positivism was, from its beginnings, bent on displaying
the “good” that might reside in institutions and customs; it focused
on their constructive, functional, useful side. However, under
Saint-Simon’s formulations, French Positivism never committed
itself to the assumption, “once useful, always useful.” Saint-Simon’s
was not a Panglossian optimism that saw this as the best of all
possible worlds, but rather was a vision of the modern social world
as incomplete, as suffering from immaturity. It was thus a qualified
Functionalism, for it did not fear to criticize what it felt were the
residual vestiges of an archaic social past still encumbering prog-
ress. It also wanted new social arrangements more in keeping with
modem industry, which it was hoped could reunite society. There-
fore it adopted a more critical stance than that characteristic of
later Functionalism. But in its subsequent academic formulations,
particularly by Comte, Positivism aimed primarily at blunting the
criticisms that the philosophies had directed against almost all the
institutions of the ancient regime.

Insofar as the “positive” implied an emphasis upon the impor-
tance of scientifically certified knowledge, it was using social
science as a rhetoric, which might provide a basis for certainty of
belief and might assemble a consensus in society. It preached “an
end to ideology” under the formulation of “an end to metaphysics.”
In other words, Positivism assumed that science could overcome
ideological variety and diversity of beliefs. Comte had, in this vein,
polemicized against the Protestant conception of unlimited liberty
of conscience, holding that this led men each to their own differing
conclusions and thus to ideological confusion. This disunifying
liberty of conscience w r as, in Comte’s view, to be supplanted by a
faith in the authority of science that would reestablish the lost
social consensus and thus make society whole again.

Comtian Positivism thus manifested the same fascination with
consensus and social cohesion, as well as with the ongoing if hid-
den usefulness of existing institutions, that later characterized
Emile Durkheim and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. The culmination of
this abiding Positivist heritage is reached in Talcott Parsons’ Struc-
tural-Functionalism, which is quite properly celebrated by E. A.
Shils as a “consensual” theory. Championing both order and
progress, the Comtians had of necessity sought progress within the
framework of middle-class property institutions and of the new in-
dustrialism, which they regarded as basically sound even if still
unfinished. In this continuity of essentially optimistic sentiments
and domain assumptions, on the level of infrastructure, modem
Functionalism is the legitimate heir of nineteenth-century Sociologi-
cal Positivism.

An Historical Model of Structural Development

”5

THE SCHISM BETWEEN' BOMANT1C AND
UTILITARIAN CULTURAL SYNDROMES

In addition to the deep structural split between Academic .and
Marxist Sociologies, there has been another, less easily crystalliz-
able cultural cleavage of consequence for sociology. Sometimes this
split has been formulated in national terms, as a difference be-
tween the French and German intellectual traditions (as, for ex-
ample, by Raymond Aron); sometimes it has been defined as a
split between the German idealistic tradition and the more Posi-
tivistic tradition of the other Western nations (as, for cx.amplc, by
Ernst Troeltsch). My own view is that this cleavage is only super-
ficially expressed in national terms, for it entails underlying cultural
tensions in all Western industrial nations, which manifest them-
selves in various cultural sectors — painting, music, theater — as
well as in sociology.

Historically, one side of this split appeared in Germany no later
than the first quarter of the nineteenth century', with the full emer-
gence of the Romantic movement as a counterstatement to ration-
alism, materialism. Positivism, and utilitarianism; in short, to the
culture of the emerging middle class. Romanticism, however, was
not simply a reactionary', right-wing opposition to the middle class
and its economic order, but had, as it were, an opening to the left.
It had revolutionary' potentialities that were, for example, developed
in the work of Marx, despite his contempt for earlier Romantics.
The revolutionary’ potential of Romanticism derived, in part, from
the fact that although basically a critique of industrialism, it could
as well be used as a critique of capitalism and its culture. As a
critique of industrialism in the period of its emergence, however,
Romanticism lent itself to use against the middle class by the
embattled older elites, especially the aristocracy, and in that context
it was often reactionary’.

Romanticism was nevertheless capable of being blended with a
working-class critique of the middle class. There was, as Henri Le
Febvre says, a Romanticism of the left as well as the right. Ro-
manticism tended to be predominantly reactionary’ in its political
effect, when it objected to the early industrial development. Ro-
manticism, however, has had liberative potentialities whenever it
has sought to transcend the middle-class limitations of utilitarian
culture in advanced industrial societies; when it has accepted the
irrational or nonrational as a source of vitality, without exalting it;
and when it has not been elitist. Freudianism has been one ex-
pression of such a Romanticism.

Romanticism has, in various ways, been one of the cultural

n6 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

syndromes around which there have developed styles of sociology
discemibly different from the Positivistic or the methodologically
empiricist. “Romantic sociologies” have been different both in sub-
stantive theory and in methodology, and have placed themselves in
tension with other styles that emulate the physical, high science
models. I will argue, in another volume, that Romanticism was one
of the major cultural influences leading to the development of
Marxism. The most important influence of Romanticism on Aca-
demic Sociology in Europe, is to be found in the work of Max
Weber, while its most important influence on American sociology
is through George Herbert Mead and the “Chicago School,” on the
one side, and Talcott Parsons, on the other.

PERIOD III: CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY

Classical Sociology emerged during the last quarter of- the nine-
teenth century, a period of consolidating industrialization, large-
scale organization, and growing imperialism prior to World War I.
Classical Sociology had more diversified national sources than
Positivism, including powerful developments in Germany as well as
new expressions within the French tradition itself. Nonetheless,
each source remained relatively national in character, with little
mutual acquaintance and influence among the key contributors.
It was also — and this was significant — increasingly institutional-
ized within the supporting university contexts of the different
countries. If the key polemical target of Positivistic Sociology had
been the philosophes and the French Revolution, the common
polemical target of the thinkers of the Classical period was Marx-
ism. Marxism was the crucial intellectual development, and social-
ism the key political development, that, as antagonists, differen-
tiated the central concerns of the first and third periods in the
development of Western Sociology. Classical Sociology was the
great achievement of the middle class of Western Europe, in the
late nineteenth century, when the individual, competitive entre-
preneur was being supplanted by increasingly large-scale and
bureaucratized industrial organization, and when in general, the
middle class was increasingly threatened by the rise of Marxist
socialism.

An Historical Model of Structural Development

**7

THE DECLINE OK EVOLUTIONISM AND RISE OF FUNCTIONALISM

Academic Sociology in the Classical period was structurally dif-
ferentiated, in various ways, from that of the Positivistic period;
one of the most important was the atrophying of social evolution-
ism both in Emile Durkheim’s work and in Max Weber's, and its
replacement by "comparative" study. This is one reason why Her-
bert Spencer, with his dominating emphasis on evolutionism, sub-
sequently failed to be regarded as a characteristic thinker of the
Classical period. In Germany, especially as epitomized by Max
Weber, comparative studies largely focused on Western European
societies, or on literate, great civiliz.ations, such as India’s. In
France, however, comparative studies increasingly incorporated,
as in Durkheim's school, materials from nonliteratc societies; here
they moved toward a juncture with anthropology, and became in-
fluential in the development of English anthropology through the
work of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. The decline of evolutionism and the
rise of Functionalism were complementary, and shaped the devel-
opment of sociology and anthropology alike.

The movement away from Positivist evolutionism and toward
Functionalism may be examined in detail in Durkheim’s work, par-
ticularly in comparison with Comte's. Perhaps the crux of the
difference was related to the fact that Comte had felt a deep
ambivalence toward the past; he was both more linked to it and
more afraid of it than Durkheim. Comte had conceived of the new
Positivist society as only one stage in an evolutionary process, al-
though he had believed it the highest stage of development that
mankind could reach. He knew that in France this highest stage
was, in his day, only half-born, and was still floundering between
a future not yet fully arrived and a past not yet wholly and safely
dead. The basic threat to the new society was, in the early Positivist
view, from the archaic remnants of the past still potent in the in-
evitably incomplete and immature present. In short, there was
postulated a theory of "cultural lag.”

Durkheim, however, was operating in a decidedly different situa-
tion, and it shaped his historical imagination quite differently.
Modem industrial society was far more developed in his time than
it had been in Comte's; it had reached and gone beyond the takeoff
point. The active threat of powerful Restorations elites was there-
fore gone, even though "vestigial” institutions remained. The
danger, in brief, was no longer seen as located in something essen-
tially of the past, but as more fully rooted in the present.

One of the areas in which this was expressed most clearly was in
Durkheim’s conception of patterns of inheritance as an “archaic

nS Sociolog)': Contradictions and Infrastructure

survival.” Clearly, however, Durkheim did not regard inheritance in
anything like the sense in which Saint-Simon had seen the restored
monarchy. It was inconceivable that Durkheim would make the
same kind of statement about inheritance that Saint-Simon had
made about the monarchy. Yet Durkheim did see inheritance as
generating tensions, and as no longer historically necessary, al-
though visibly rooted in the present. The brunt of Durkheim’s
critique of inheritance saw it as doomed because it has a manifest
inappropriateness to other aspects of the society, particularly its
contractual ethics, and because it has an injurious effect upon the
modem division of labor. In conceiving of inheritance as a “sur-
vival,” he presented an image of it as a fish out of water, doomed to
die a natural death, rather than as something having to be actively
and forcefully deposed through revolutionary change. It would be
gradually and peacefully closed down, step by step, painlessly put to
sleep by a euthanasia administered by guild-like, syndicalist corpor-
ations. Removing it required no bloody conflict.

For Durkheim, then, the basic threat to modem society did not
come from still powerful remnants of the past, actively hostile and
dangerous to the present. He was ready to relinquish this half of the
Positivist theory of cultural lag, to forgo that part of it that blamed
current ills on the past. To repeat, it was not that he did not see
inheritance as causing trouble, but that he did not see it as deeply
threatening. Certainly he did not consider it nearly as important as
the growth of anomie, or the decline of a binding morality that
would restrain men. His central concern was not economic poverty,
but the poverty of morality.

The important question is how Durkheim viewed this decline of
morality. In particular, did he see it in terms of the cultural lag
theory, as an expression of an insufficiency natural to a young
society, and sooner or later to be overcome spontaneously, through
its own natural process of maturation? Not entirely. His refusal to
take this tack was implicit in his planned effort to surmount the
problem now, through the deliberate development of syndicalist
corporations. This implied that the “poverty of morality” could be
overcome in the present; it need not wait for the future. In short,
while there was nothing in the present that would make this remedy
inevitable, there was also nothing in the present that would make
it impossible. The outcome depended not upon a future unfolding
and maturation, but upon the present and on decisions in it.

Durkheim was thus beginning to close down the theory of cul-
tural lag from both ends. It was neither the threat from the past
that was most serious, nor the necessary incompleteness of the
present. Durkheim had no need to curse the past or pray to the
future, for things would not be i\dically different in it. The really

An Historical Model of Structural Development 119

serious dangers to society, for Durkheim, were rooted in the in-
herent insatiability of man, and these would remain the same for
all societies and be unchanged in the future. From Durkheim’s
standpoint, socialism could bring no significant change in this, the
essential character of man. Man would be ever the same; there was,
in effect, no point in looking forward to the future for a radical
change in society. It was the present, therefore, that counted. This
had much the same implication as Max Webers view of modem
industrialization as being essentially “bureaucratic” in nature, and
his consequent prediction that socialism would be no less bureau-
cratic than capitalism. There was really no choice, in this respect,
between socialism and the present society.

Socialism and Marxism had taken a very future-oriented time
perspective, adopting an historical and evolutionary emphasis in
which it was stressed that the present society would inevitably be
superseded by a radically different one. To this, Durkheim polemi-
cally replied that social science was still far too immature to see
the future. It was precisely in connection with his polemic against
socialism that his opposition to an evolutionary outlook that at-
tempted to predict the future was most explicitly formulated, and
his counteraffirmation, that sociology is concerned about what is or
was, was most emphatically advanced. While Comte had raised the
motto of “Order and Progress,” Durkheim, in contrast, felt con-
strained to place even less emphasis upon "progress” than had
Comte; he came to invest his energies almost exclusively in the
analysis of “order.” In short, Durkheim began to truncate the
future orientation of Comtianism in the course of his polemic
against the conceived future projected by Marxism and socialism.
He thus began the consolidation of sociology as a social science of
the synchronic present, which came to culmination in contem-
porary Functionalism.

At the same time that Durkheim foreshortened the future-
oriented perspective of early Positivism, he also began to revise its
conception of the past. In his distinction between two forms of
society, the organically and mechanically solidary, it was clear that
the former referred primarily to modem industrial societies. In-
deed, the distinction was, in one way, intended to be a defense of
their inherent stability. “Mechanical solidarity,” on the other hand,
referred to almost all earlier societies, or at least to many that had
existed at widely different periods. Mechanical solidarity lumped
together societies as widely spaced and different as feudalism and
tribalism.

The dichotomy between organically and mechanically solidary
societies was, in effect, a distinction between “now” and “then.”
Modem industrial society was being conceptually cut out of its

120

Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

former place in a multiphased series of societies; it was being used
as a central point of reference, which gave all. that had come before
its value and interest. The present was being constituted as an
island out of time; the past was no longer to be thought to embody
its own significant temporal gradations and developments, but to
be treated primarily as a convenient contrast with the present
rather than as a preparation for it. Here evolutionism was giving
way to “comparative studies.”

In some ways, this was similar to the Comtian impulse to see
the evolutionary development of society as having come to climac-
tic culmination in Positivist society. Yet, the historical sense of
Comtianism, and of classical Positivism in general, had been much
stronger; it had, in fact, given birth to new schools of historiog-
raphy, such as that of Augustin Thierry, Saint-Simon’s pupil. If it
had viewed the past primarily as preparation for the coming of the
Positivist society, it had also insisted upon doing justice to it, by
studying the step-by-step, phase-by-phase, temporal process by
which Positivism had finally emerged. To Durkheim, however, the
past had little value, except when it could, by comparison, help him
to understand the present.

Durkheim's move away from evolutionism toward comparative
studies had one important intellectual advantage. It became a mat-
ter of indifference whether a past society had any known historical
linkage with the present, and it thus widened the range of societies
that might be considered of interest. This meant that sociology no
longer had to confine itself to the European experience or even
to great civilizations; it could now include in its comparative data
even tribal societies. It was in this broadening of his studies to
include tribal societies that Durkheim made a most important
intellectual advance beyond Comte. This development of interest
in tribal societies did not, however, occur in a social vacuum, but
was concurrent with the increasing activity of the European powers
in Africa and elsewhere, and concurrent with the intensive develop-
ment of nineteenth-century colonialization. Both of these develop-
ments, the European colonialization of other continents and the
development of Durkheim’s sociology in a nonevolutionary direction
capable of incorporating tribal studies, contributed to the critical
shift that was to occur in anthropology, particularly English anthro-
pology.

DIFFERENTIATION OF THE GERMAN AND
FRENCH RESPONSES TO UTILITARIANISM

The broadening of the concept of “utility,” begun by the Positiv-
ists, was carried forward and incorporated into Functionalism by

An Historical Model of Structural Development izi

Durkheim’s work, and then diffused into English anthropology. The
emerging “functional” theory sought to show how the persistence
or change of any social institution or custom had to be understood
in terms of its ongoing consequences for surrounding institutions
and behavior. It had to be explained in terms of its place in and
its contributions to the larger society of which it was a part. In
other words: “function” was a broad and subtle way of talking
about the usefulness of all (not merely economic) “social” rela-
tions, behaviors, and beliefs.

The successful appeal of Functionalism has rested, in part, on
its ability to resonate congenially the practical, utilitarian senti-
ments of men socialized into a dominant middle-class culture, men
who feel that things and people must be, and are, legitimated by
their ongoing usefulness. Being thus at variance with sentiments
of aristocratic insouciance and traditionalism, as well as with
socialist critiques of middle-class society as entailing exploitation
based on power rather than utility. Sociological Functionalism was
congenial to the middle class in its struggle against the new masses
and, if need be, against the old elites. The revisionist broadening
of utilitarianism occurred mostly in France.

However, Functionalism was seriously alien to cultures, such as
the German, having a massive infusion of Romanticism and a
mandarin disdain for middle-class culture: Weber rejects Func-
tionalism. German sociolog)' was thus characterized by a radical
polemic against utilitarianism, rather than by a broadening and
sublimation of it. Culminating around the turn of the century' in
Max Weber’s sociology of religion, it stressed the importance of
ideas in general and of religious ethics in particular, as influences
upon social development and human conduct. Rather than ac-
counting for social action in terms of its functions or useful con-
sequences, it emphasized that social outcomes were the result of
men’s efforts to conform -with ideas and ideals. As had Romanti-
cism, Weber’s emphasis was on the autonomy and importance of
the ideas to which men inwardly committed themselves, and on how
these shaped history. Weber’s position was, in large part, a polemic
against the Marxist conception that ideologies were a “super-
structural” adaptation to the economic “infrastructure.” In contrast,
Weber argued that the economic system of Western Europe, cap-
italism itself, was the unanticipated consequence of conformity
with the Protestant Ethic.

Weber’s valuation of the utilitarian traditions of middle-class
culture was more hostile than was Durkheim’s, while Durkheim’s
was in turn more critical than had been the sociologists’ of the
Positivist era. Both Weber and Durkheim agreed on the importance
of moral values in producing profound, even if unintended, con-

122 Sociolog)': Contradictions and Infrastructure

sequences: capitalism for the former, suicide for the latter. Both
thus commonly stressed the importance of the nonrational in men.
Yet there were important ways in which their views of moral values
differed. For one, Durkheim stressed the inhibiting and restraining
function of moral values; he saw them as limiting men’s appetites
and thus as preventing anomic insatiability. Weber, however,
tended to accent the energizing, motivational significance of moral
values; he saw them as stimuli to human striving. For Weber,
values express and ignite passions rather than restrain appetites.

Durkheim also stressed the role of moral values, when shared,
as a source of social and specifically “mechanical” solidarity;
Weber saw men as led into conflict in the defense of their differing
values. Durkheim thus regarded moral values as pattern-maintain-
ing, socially equilibrating forces; Weber focused on the power of
values to disrupt established boundaries, patterns, and equilibria.
For Weber values were significant in lending meaning and purpose
to individual life; they have a human significance. But for Durk-
heim their significance was primarily social: they contribute to the
solidarity of society, and to the integration of individuals into
society.

Underlying the different treatment of values by Durkheim and
Weber was the difference in their critiques of utilitarian culture.
Durkheim feared that it would unleash appetites, inflame men with
an insatiable lust for material satisfactions and acquisitions. In
effect, he saw industrialism as turbulence-generating, anarchy-
inducing: in short, as undermining social order. Weber’s concern
was the very opposite. His essential fear was not of social disorder
but of entropy, lifelessness, lack of arousal, lack of passionate in-
volvement. Weber readily acknowledged the efficiency and pro-
ductivity of modem bureaucratic society, but he feared that it
entailed a routinization of life, in which men accommodate them-
selves to the social machinery and become lifeless, dependent grey
cogs. It was not the threat to social order that Weber most feared,
but the successful creation of a social order so powerful that it
would be autonomous of men; he is, in short, concerned with the
problem of human alienation in a utilitarian society. Durkheim, in
contrast, regarded this same externality and autonomy of social
structures as a normal and healthful condition, needed to constrain
men.

Durkheim adopted the position of sublimated, revisionist utili-
tarianism, insisting on the usefulness of the division of labor. He
emphasized that it was not only useful economically, as a way of
increasing productivity, but also had another, more fundamental
function or use, the production of social and specifically “organic”

An Historical Model of Structural Development 123

solidarity. Division of labor would do this not so much by enhanc-
ing men's individual satisfactions as by making them dependent
upon one another and by encouraging in them a chastening sense
of dependence on the social whole. It would restrain men. Under
"norma!" conditions the new utilitarian culture could potentially
have a benign effect. But, added Durkheim, the modem organiza-
tion of the division of labor was not yet normal; what was needed
was a new morality that would restrain men's appetites, regulate
and interconnect occupational specializations, and make men
willingly accept differential roles and rewards. A shared morality
that would accomplish this was necessary for the solidarity of
modern societies, for only a moral force would be accepted willingly
by men. In effect, then. Durkhcim’s treatment of morality, as well
as of the division of labor, focused on its functional importance
as necessary and useful for the maintenance of society and social
older.

Morality, for Durkheim, is that which contributes to or is useful
for social solidarity. Durkheim thus conceived of morality in a way
that was congruent with the bourgeois sentiment for the useful.
Far from simply being one of the higher refinements of culture,
an elegant but useless luxury, morality was held to be essential to
social existence. Like those who say that "nothing is more practical
than a good theory," Durkheim was saying that nothing is more
useful to society than morality. Thus, for all of his polemic against
what he correctly regarded as Saint-Simon’s utilitarianism, his own
critique was itself limited by middle-class utilitarian sentiments of
the most popular sort. Such a rationale for morality would have
been anathema to Weber, who saw its essential justification in the
meaning with which it endowed life rather than in its usefulness
to society.

continuities mrrwKKN rosrrivjsM and tunctionausm

At bottom, Functionalism sought to show that social customs,
relationships, and institutions persisted because, and only because,
they had some social "function,” which is to say, an ongoing use-
fulness, even if this was unrecognized by those who were involved
in them. Functionalists Implied that if social arrangements per-
sisted, tills could only be because they facilitated exchanges in
which all parties involved were benefiting. Usually, however,
Functionalists failed to consider what, from the Marxist perspec-
tive, is crucial; whether the measure of what is received bears any
correspondence to what is given. In short, Functionalism dodged

2 2j Sociolog}': Contradictions and Infrastructure

the problem of “exploitation.’' that is, of giving less than one
receives, and instead simply asserted that social arrangements
which survive must, in some degree and in some way, be con-
tributing to the welfare of society. It was the job of the Function-
alist, sociologist or anthropologist, to exercise his ingenuity to find
out how this was being done. The implicit slogan of Functionalism
was: Survival implies ongoing usefulness — search it out!

Functionalism thus served to defend existing social arrange-
ments on nontraditional grounds, against the criticism that they
w r ere based on power or force. From the Functionalist perspective
there was a tacit morality in things that justified their existence:
the morality of usefulness. Functionalism also sought to show that
even if given arrangements were not useful economically, they
might still be useful in other, noneconomic ways; in short, they
might be socially functional. Thus, they attempted to demonstrate
that new economic arrangements, such as the intensified division
of labor, were not advantageous simply for individual selfish gain,
but also had a social usefulness, contributing to the very solidarity
of society. Thus, from Positivism to Functionalism, sociology em-
bodied the standard of social utilitarianism: usefulness to society.

This continuity from Positivism to Functionalism will be missed
only if one fails to distinguish philosophical utilitarianism from
popular, cultural utilitarianism. The latter does not refer only to
behavior that is intended to be useful, and deliberately and ration-
ally pursues courses of action that optimize desired outcomes; this
is only one type of utilitarianism, which might be called “anticipa-
tory” or rational utilitarianism. There is, however, another kind of
popular middle-class utilitarianism: a “retroactive” utilitarianism
that judged social arrangements in terms of their ongoing conse-
quences, and was quite prepared to believe them legitimate when-
ever they were useful, without insisting that this utility be planned
in advance. This is clearly evidenced by eighteenth-century political
economy, which held that individual decisions on the market had
advantageous, albeit unintended, consequences for society as a
whole: that is, “private vices, public benefits.” Popular utilitarian-
ism, then, entailed a concern with judging actions in terms of their
useful consequences, but it did not always require that these be
anticipated prior to their occurrence.

In both anticipatory and retroactive utilitarianism, the standard
of judgment was the useful. It was the sentiment for the useful,
not the philosophical theory of utilitarianism, that was central to
the bourgeois polemic against the traditionalism of the old regimes.
Popular utilitarianism served to draw a line between the parasitical
idlers of the old regime and the hard-working middle class, whose
new political claims it served to legitimate.

An Historical Model of Structural Development

125

THE PROBLEM OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY IN ENGLAND

The considerations advanced above need to be related to certain
peculiarities of English social science: Functionalism has been
incorporated primarily in English anthropology rather than sociol-
ogy; indeed, it is only rather recently that England has developed
an academically institutionalized sociology as such. The absence of
Functional Sociology, and the weak institutional development of
sociology in general, may seem perplexing from a standpoint such
as our own, which stresses the link between Functional Sociology
and utilitarianism. For, one of the distinctive intellectual develop-
ments of the middle class in Britain was precisely its utilitarian-
ism. Why, then, is there a Functional Anthropology in Britain, but
not a Functional Sociology? This needs to be explained in a par-
simonious manner, consistent with the presence of Functional
Sociology elsewhere. That is, the explanation must account for the
presence of a Functional Sociology in certain cases, as well as for
its absence in others.

Perry Anderson’s thoughts on this problem are valuable and
relevant here. He suggests that the English middle class, being
“traumatized by the French Revolution and fearful of the nascent
working-class movement,” accommodated itself to the English
aristocracy . 11 Instead of wresting hegemony from the aristocracy,
the British middle class fused with it to form a “composite” ruling
class. British culture therefore remained under aristocratic influ-
ence, and middle-class utilitarianism thus never became the dom-
inant cidtural influence. ‘The hegemonic ideology of this society
was a much more aristocratic combination of ‘traditionalism’ and
‘empiricism,’ intensely hierarchical in its emphasis, which accu-
rately registered the history of the dominant agrarian class .” 12

In short, the English aristocracy fostered a culture that was
dissonant with a utility-rooted justification for its own preeminent
position. The English aristocracy’s mandate has never rested pri-
marily on its usefulness to society or to the other classes, or on the
social functions it performs. (It took an American sociologist,
E. A. Shils, to advance such a view of the English monarchy.) Like
other aristocracies, the English did not believe that its social posi-
tion was justified by hard work and diligent, specialized achieve-
ment, but by its gentlemanly cultivation and breeding, the in-
herited grace that endowed it with a confident sense of its own
“natural" superiority. The aristocracy’s eminence and prerogatives
were held to derive from what history had made it, from what it
was, and not merely from what it now did in society. A sociology
that incorporated middle-class sentiments of utility and of legiti-

125

Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

macy would subvert rather than sustain such an aristocracy, as
was perfectly plain as early as Saint-Simon’s parable of the sudden
death of the French Court.

A Functional Sociology would be dissonant with the English
aristocracy’s traditional modes of legitimation. It would also be un-
attractive to the British middle class, or at least the upper middle
class, which merged itself with this aristocracy; which married and
bought itself into the aristocracy’s style of life and thus accepted
family lineage and “connections” as legitimate, and generally
placed itself under the cultural hegemony of the aristocracy.

This fact bears upon the absence of a Functional Sociology in
Great Britain, but it still does not clarify why there has been hardly
any academically powerful sociology in Britain. Perry Anderson
suggests that this is related to the absence of a powerful Marxist
tradition in Britain :

The political threat which had so largely influenced the birth of soci-
ology [I would say, Classical Sociology] on the continent — the rise of
socialism — did not materialize in England . . . the dominant class in
Britain was thus never moved to produce a counter-totalizing thought
by the danger of revolutionary socialism . 13

To. summarize this in terms of .my own formulations above:
Functional Sociology is a social theory consistent with the middle
class’s need for an ideological justification of its own social legiti-
macy and with its drive to maintain a social identity distinguish-
able from that of the established aristocracy, at least where such an
aristocracy existed. A Functional Sociology, therefore, would not be
congenial to a middle class — such as the British — that, fusing
with the aristocracy under the latter’s cultural hegemony, did not
seek a distinctive ideological justification for its legitimacy, since
it adopted the aristocracy’s, and, far from wanting to maintain an
independent social identity of its own, wished to merge with the
aristocracy. Correspondingly, the English middle class’s domestic
influence and legitimacy were not, during the Classical period,
threatened from below by a powerful revolutionary socialism or by
a systematic Marxism that would stimulate it to formulate a
systematic theoretical defense of itself and of its society.

FUNCTIONALISM IN ENGLISH ANTHROPOLOGY

The central role that Functionalism came to play in English
anthropology was acceptable under these social conditions because
anthropology’s focal concern is not 'with domestic English society
but with its colonies elsewhere. In this respect, English Functional

An Historical Model of Structural Development 127

Anthropology remains in the tradition set by earlier English evolu-
tionism:

Broadly speaking, it is true of all the evolutionary social theorists
that they could recognize the social functions of irrational, absurd, and
superstitious practices only provided that they were someone else’s, or
at least, if present in their own society, that they were merely transi-
tory. 14

English evolutionary anthropology had largely been an armchair
assimilation from secondary sources provided by historians, trav-
elers, and administrators, and it had lacked funds either for field
research or for the support of the researcher. As Huxley wrote to
A. C. Haddon in the 1880’s, “I do not see any way by which a dev-
otee of anthropology is to come at the bread — let alone the
butter.” 15

Evolutionary anthropology had been shaped in the period of
English dominance, during the consolidation of Empire. It had been
created by a society for whom a large part of the world was their
domain, their labor supply, and their protected market; it was, in
short, made in the world of a confident and ascending middle class,
with solid prospects. Functionalism, however, arose following
World War I, which is to say, against the backdrop of a violent
challenge to English dominion and Empire; it arose when English
precedence was no longer taken for granted, when the English
could no longer feel confident that their own society represented
the culmination of an evolutionary process from which they might
look down benignly upon “lower” peoples. Following World War I,
the English future was felt as uncertain and was not to be savored
in anticipation: doubtful prospects foreshortened future-oriented
thinking. In this setting, the prospect was not the inevitable up-
lifting of backward colonies in their common evolution toward the
future; the task was now to hold on to the colonies and to keep
them under control. The sanguine expectation of progress gave way
to the grim problem of order.

Moreover, if it was now not at all sure that the "absurd” practices
of contemporary, domestic English society were transitory imper-
fections, to be gently erased by inexorable progress, how then could
they be happily viewed? Functionalism replied that they really
were not absurd at all but actually possessed a hidden usefulness
and were, at bottom, functional. Functionalism, then, emerged in a
Europe where there was a sense of the precariousness of society
and a fear that any tampering with the status quo might have
dangerously ramifying consequences. Thus, in one of his first
papers, Malinowski argued that culture was an integrated whole

128 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

comprised of interdependent parts; touch any one of them, he sug-
gested, and there is danger of a general collapse. 10 The emergence
of Functionalism, particularly in anthropology, thus corresponded
to the changing structure of sentiments that was becoming per-
vasive in Europe.

The two most important anthropologists to move toward a fully
Functional Anthropology were A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bron-
islaw Malinowski. Each of them was deeply influenced by Durk-
heim’s work, although each in a different way. Radcliffe-Brown’s
development of Functional Anthropology was very similar to
Durkheim’s work, centering as it did on the problem of social order
in primitive societies. There is hardly any institution of primitive
society that Radcliffe-Brown did not view primarily in terms of its
usefulness for social solidarity, be it dancing or subsistence-getting.

For his part, however, Malinowski was engaged in a persistent
polemic against Durkheim, particularly because of Durkheim’s
tendency to spiritualize and reify society. Malinowski sought to link
social institutions with species needs, which he saw as foci around
which institutions develop. It was precisely Malinowski’s reduction-
istic tendency to find the roots of social institutions in the common
needs of individuals that was at first more congenial to the English,
because it resonated persisting traditions of English empiricism
and individualism; indeed, it was even consistent with Spencer’s
version of evolutionism, which held that “every phenomenon ex-
hibited by an aggregation of men originates in some quality of man
himself.” 17

Individualistic though it was, however, there was also a strain of
Marxist influence in Malinowski’s views; stripped of its reduction-
ism, Malinowski’s conception of the rooting of social institutions in
universal needs of the individual echoed Marx’s concern about
“species” characteristics as foci of social development. There are
other places in which Malinowski’s borrowing from Marx, char-
acteristically unacknowledged, seems even plainer. For example,
Malinowski stressed that black magic is an instrument of social
control primarily available to people of power and wealth in primi-
tive societies, and not uniformly accessible to all.

Malinowski insisted that the “oedipal complex” is not universal
and argued that the form it assumed in the Trobriand Islands,
where the child feels hostility against his uncle rather than his
father, was due to the power the uncle has over him and to the
constraining authority he exercises. Malinowski also polemicized
against Durkheim’s view of the sources of social solidarity, arguing
that even in primitive societies this is due not to the awe in which
the group’s “collective conscience” is regarded, but rather to the
practical patterns of reciprocity through which members of the

An Historical Model of Structural Development 129

group exchange gratifications. Typically, when Malinowski sought
to explain how primitive norms were actually activated and en-
forced, "he noted that this was not an automatic process: the group
as a whole did not recoil in collective hostility against those who
had offended its moral beliefs, but rather the reaction was mediated
by the vested interests of particular individuals who had personally
and directly suffered as a result of the offender’s behavior.

The difference between Malinowski with his undertow’ of Marx-
ism and the more orthodox Durkheimian, Radcliff e-Brown, is
epitomized in their differing approaches to magic. Malinowski
noted that the people he had studied, the Trobrianders, tended to
use more magic when they went on hazardous deep-sea fishing ex-
peditions than when they fished the more protected lagoon waters.
He concluded that magic functioned to reduce the greater anxieties
induced by deep-sea fishing, and was less used in lagoon fishing
because the situation there was more controllable. Malinowski held
that magic generally served to reduce anxieties that were not tech-
nologically controllable, and thereby enabled men to carry out their
duties. Radcliffe-Brown, in contrast, focused on magical practices
surrounding childbirth and family behavior, and he concluded that
magic did not reduce anxieties but actually heightened them, and
thereby solemnized the activities with which they were associated.
To Malinowski, then, magic functioned to allow men to go about
their business and get their work done; to Radcliffe-Brown, in
rather Durkheimian spirit, magic functioned to infuse certain
activities with sentiments of solemnity, awe, and humility, cere-
monially communicating the high pathos that the society bestowed
upon the activity.

Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown agreed, however, on an
ami-evolutionary view. A practice, custom, or belief was to be in-
terpreted in terms of its present and ongoing functions in the
surrounding society. Nothing, in effect, was any longer to be seen
as an “archaic survival,” which is to say, nothing was to be under-
stood as a relic that had once been but no longer was useful. The
anthropologist was no longer to look to the past in order to under-
stand die present. He w T as not to reconstruct dubious evolutionary
stages in which he could locate and interpret things still presently
observable, in order to account for their present condition. In short,
they w'ere dealing a death blow to the Positivist’s theory of cultural
lag.

Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown are the bridge between Durk-
heim and modem Sociological Functionalism. Although contem-
porary Functionalists have sought to purify their discipline of “un-
necessary assumptions,” which they attribute to these anthropolo-
gists, we cannot overestimate their abiding influence. For one.

130 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

Anthropological Functionalism powerfully consolidated the anti-
evolutionary and comparativist orientation that had begun to
emerge in Durkheim. Later Sociological Functionalists were deeply
influenced by the anthropologists’ polemic against evolutionism,
especially where it coincided with a similar vector in their own
sociological tradition. Modem Sociological Functionalism of the
fourth period emerged bereft of focalized historical interests, un-
concerned with future-gazing, and embedded in a timeless present.

Having adopted the ahistorical standpoint of an Anthropological
Functionalism that often had no choice, since it studied societies
without a recorded history, Sociological Functionalism broke en-
tirely with evolutionism, adopting this view even of literate societies
for which there was an ample historical record. Influenced by
social anthropology’s reliance upon methods of first-hand field ob-
servation of ongoing social processes, Sociological Functionalists
tended increasingly to confine themselves to what could be observed
at first-hand. However, they were not able to accomplish what
many anthropologists could: to study entire societies seen as a
whole. It was possible for anthropologists to do this, despite their
use only of first-hand, detailed observation, because the societies
they studied were often no larger than several hundred people.
But, committed to such methods and to avoiding historical depth,
sociologists would find it increasingly difficult to study societies as a
whole.

Anthropological Functionalists, furthermore, commonly investi-
gated societies that had not yet developed a modem politics. Thus,
in effect, as Durkheim had appeared to cleanse Functionalism of
religion, so Anthropological Functionalists appeared to cleanse it
of political relevance. Functionalism was not only becoming secu-
larized, it was cn the verge of becoming innocuous. Of course, one
could not use primitive societies to study modern problems, such
as the development of modem socialism, industrialism, or the class
struggle. Yet there were other problems of contemporary relevance
that anthropologists might have studied, had they been disposed
to do so. These other problems they largely chose to ignore, includ-
ing above all the problems of imperialism and of the conditions
underlying native struggles for national independence. That they
shied away from these problems was not due to the absence of
opportunity. It was rather that this anthropology operated within
the context of an imperialism and colonialism that were under
increasing pressure.

Distinct from its intellectual intentions, then, the societal, sub-
sidiary task of this anthropology was often to facilitate the admin-
istration of tribal people, whose ways were radically different from
and txoublesomely unfamiliar to English administrators. Functional

An Historical Model of Structural Development 131

Anthropology thus lived something of a double life. If anthropolo-
gists played a role for English colonialism, they also often viewed
themselves as the paternalistic protectors of indigenous tribal
institutions and culture. Often they sought to defend native insti-
tutions from the moral indignation and the political expedience of
English administrators. In this vein, for example, Malinowski de-
fended black magic among the Trobrianders, viewing it as an
indigenous instrument of social control which, as such, should not
be attacked by English administrators out of moral zeal.

Anthropological Functionalism based itself on the study of dom-
inated cultures, many of which were still far from national inde-
pendence and industrialization, a goal which their colonial ad-
ministrators did not want them to approach. The task of colonial
administrators was not to facilitate change but to keep things stable
and orderly. They wanted to do this with the smallest investment
in state apparatus and the least cost of policing and administration.
The colonies, after all, were not meant to be run at a loss. English
administrators therefore wanted and welcomed a native social
system that was orderly and self-maintaining, and Anthropological
Functionalism, which was concerned with these problems, was
relevant and congenial.

Yet while administrators and anthropologists commonly wanted
these cultures to remain much as they had been, the administrators
also wanted natives to pay taxes and to be available for labor.
These, of course, were contradictory policies, for inevitably native
contact with English values and technology brought change. Early
Functional Anthropology usually paid little attention to the rela-
tions between the colonial power and the native society, and, when
it did, it was commonly viewed as a form of “culture contact,” seen
from the perspective of its disorganizing impact on the native
society. Anthropological Functionalism did not view native soci-
eties as being in the process of a lawful evolution, as, for example,
the early Sociological Positivists had viewed nineteenth-century
France. They did not take it for granted that these cultures were
destined to be industrialized or independent. They often counseled
tolerance of native institutions and sought to preserve them, some-
times from romantic and sometimes simply from humane motives.

Although Anthropological Functionalism was sometimes critical
of English practices toward native institutions, this was marginal
criticism, rarely objecting to European domination as such, but only
seeking to make this domination better informed and more re-
strained. Correspondingly, it rarely adopted a critical attitude
toward traditional native institutions, but rather more commonly
defended them in romantic ways. Its basic posture toward both
European and native societies was therefore essentially compatible

132 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

with the maintenance of European dominance and with the inhibi-
tion of the political autonomy and industrialization of colonial
areas. And this was compatible with the basic policies of colonialism.
While some Functional Anthropologists conceived it as their societal
task to educate colonial administrators, none thought it their duty
to tutor native revolutionaries.

In approaching English anthropology, it is vital to understand
the gentlemanly self-image of its practitioners and of its audience
of administrators. As Duncan Macrae remarks, ‘The subject . . .
has prestige. It is associated with colonial administration — tradi-
tionally a career for gentlemen . . .” 18 That Malinowski was the
scion of a Polish aristocracy never impeded his career or barred his
way in English society. Indeed, Malinowski’s own views were often
informed by assumptions congenial to the aristocracy: he viewed
those who wished to outlaw war among native peoples in something
of the manner in which the fox-hunting aristocracy views those
who wish to put an end to their sport; he had an aristocrat’s under-
standing of the practical value of religion for the maintenance of
social order; and he had a Burkean feeling for the wisdom of tradi-
tion. “Destroy tradition,” he warns, “and you will deprive the col-
lective organism of its protective shell and give it over to the slow
inevitable process of dying out.”

Aristocratic assumptions were thus combined with a view of
society as an organism bound together by the uses or functions that
each part contributes to the others. In effect, Malinowski mobilized
traditional bourgeois assumptions about utility to defend native
society from criticism by this very middle-class morality, which he
termed the “convention-bound, parochial, middle-class mind.”
There is, as it were, in Malinowski, a foreground sound and a
background sound. Underneath his aristocrat’s contempt for the
parochialism of middle-class morality was an appreciation of the
possible universality of middle-class utilitarianism. And under-
neath the anthropologist’s explicit defense of native institutions
was the aristocrat’s tacit defense of aristocratic institutions.

Malinowski viewed native institutions from the standpoint of
the aristocrat within the anthropologist, with a submerged sense of
an affinity between the customs of the aristocracy and those of
native societies: dinosaur called to dinosaur. This sensed affinity
derived from the fact that both groups’ customs were vulnerable
to a popular criticism that could condemn each of them as archaic,
outmoded, and useless. Thus Malinowski’s view of one group’s
customs resonates his view of the other’s; his defense of native
customs is seen to have implication for the defense of aristocratic
customs. Malinowski’s emphasis on the functionality of all customs
— his “universal Functionalism” — was a generalized statement of

An Historical Model of Structural Development 133

a narrower impulse, namely, to defend precisely those institutions
that seemed devoid of utility to the middle class. It was, above all,
a defense of that which the lower middle class regarded as non-
rational , whether in distant colonies or in England itself. Indeed,
Malinowski himself expressly drew the parallel between the "savage
customs" of native peoples and "silly” English games, such as
cricket, golf, football, and fox-hunting. These were not “wasting
time," insisted Malinowski; indeed, an ethnological view would
show that “to wipe out sport, or even to undermine its influence,
would be a crime." Aristocratic custom, style of life, and leisure, no
less than native institutions, now had a common theoretical de-
fense. Behind English Anthropological Functionalism, then, was a
hidden impulse to defend the aristocracy against a narrowly con-
ceived bourgeois standard of utility, in terms of a more broadly
conceived standard of social utility.

To have overtly and systematically defended the aristocracy’s
position in English society in terms of its ongoing usefulness would
have been tactlessly at variance with the self-conceptions of both aris-
tocrats and gentleman-scholars. In short, a Functional Sociology
would have to join the issue in an overt way, on the level of public
discussion. A Functional Anthropology, however, need never do
this in any pointed and embarrassing way; but it could, and did,
establish a tacit line of defense for the aristocracy in terms of the
functional methodology it developed, if not in terms of the specific
societies to which this methodology was applied.

The domestic implications of this functional ideology were not
lost upon the peers w r ho shared its universe of discourse. If English
Anthropological Functionalism devoted its focal attention to search-
ing out the hidden functionality of native institutions, there was
also, within its subsidiary awareness, a ready sense of the manner
in which this same defense might serve gentlemen at home. The
utilitarianism on which this defense rested, however, was not the
shopkeeper’s concern for private gain. It was not a utilitarianism
that was desirous, as Sir Henry Maine once put it, of “turning Her
Majesty's government into what tradesmen call a ‘concern.’ ” None-
theless, it remained interested in all that was "useful” for preserv-
ing a way of life with arranged privilege. It was a sublimated social
utilitarianism blended with a traditionalistic sensibility, concerned
to receive and responsibly hand on Empire and to be useful in its
governance.

Functionalism, then, was certainly not the ideology of an unre-
constructed, highly individualistic, and highly competitive bour-
geoisie; the social ideology of this class was "social Darwinism.”
Instead, Functionalism became the social theory of an upper
middle class that did not stress overt individualistic competition

134 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

because in England its aspirations were to gentility and to an alli-
ance with the aristocracy. And elsewhere the middle class did not
stress competition, for it was becoming involved in large-scale
industrial organizations with growing requirements for cooperation
and integration.

As the middle class becomes constrained to attend to the grow-
ing demands of the working class and of other social strata mar-
ginal to modem industrialism, it increasingly adopts the stand-
point of a social rather than individual utilitarianism. It thus moves
toward convergence with sociology’s own earlier anticipations of
social utilitarianism and of the Welfare State. Under these chang-
ing social conditions, sociology should receive more sustained sup-
port from the middle class, whose own assumptions and sentiments
are becoming consistent with it. In short, sociology should come
into its own under the Welfare State.

THE EXTRUSION OF RELIGION

One of the important and new characteristics of Academic
Sociology in the Classical period was its secularization. In the first,
or Positivistic period the characteristic sociologists had treated re-
ligion as an area requiring practical pronouncement. Both Saint-
Simon and Comte had capped their intellectual careers by propos-
ing and providing detailed plans for new religions of humanity.
They regarded their religious plans as legitimate enterprises for
students of society such as themselves, and as necessary to give
practical implementation to their sociological studies. The “religion
of humanity” was the applied sociology of Positivism.

By the third or Classical period of sociology, however, the reli-
gion of humanity disappeared as a distinct structure in the work of
sociologists and was, in effect, replaced by the sociology of religion.
The creating of new religions was succeeded by the study of estab-
lished or historical religions, which were dealt with in terms and
standards relevant to the scholarly role as such. Part of what was
involved here was not only a change in the subjects now studied,
but also a change in the nature of the scholarly role itself. Religion
was examined not in the critical manner of the “pre-Marxians ,”
Feuerbach and Strauss, but in the “dispassionate” spirit of the
professional scholar.

This does not mean, however, that sociologists of the Classical
period viewed religion as just one more social phenomenon, no
more important to society than any other. Religion continued to be
attributed a very special importance in the affairs of men, but this
was now expressed in the formulations and assumptions of schol-

An Historical Model of Structural Development 135

arly theory and research. The religious concerns of sociology be-
came sublimated and secularized, but they did not disappear. This
transition can be clearly seen in the differences between Comte’s
and Durkheim’s treatment of religion.

In the course of his studies of religion, Durkheim developed a
conception of the requirements of social order, which premised that
society itself was the godhead and that social order depended on
the creation and maintenance of a set of moral orientations that
were essentially religious in character. In Durkheim, therefore, the
religious impulse tvas no longer expressed, as it had been by Comte,
in the formulation of a religion of humanity as a distinct and ex-
ternalized structure. Durkheim had no religion of humanity as
such. He sublimated and depersonalized the manifest religious
craving of the Comtian, although he did not eliminate it.

Durkheim thus gave sociology a new, secularized public image.
He presented it as a discipline primarily concerned with what is
and what has been but not with what ought to be. A “value-free”
conception of sociology emerged in Durkheim’s work with greater
sharpness. In some part this was stimulated by his effort to dis-
tinguish sociology from socialism. It was further strengthened by
Durkheim’s readiness to relinquish in practice the earlier, Comtian
expectation that sociology' could stipulate and legitimate values,
even though Durkheim still maintained in principle that this would
be possible at some future time.

sociology’s integration into the university

This structural change in the sociologist’s conception of his
discipline and his role during the Classical period was related to
sociology’s new integration into the growing and renovated uni-
versity system in Europe. Sociology in the Classical period was no
longer the avocation of stigmatized social reformers but the voca-
tion of prestigious academicians. Sociology became a standard
full-time career for men who, working in state-sponsored univer-
sities, were commonly constrained to accommodate to the claims
and sensibilities of theological faculties within the universities as
well as to the expectations of state authorities outside of it.

The university itself was, during this period, becoming an agency
for the integration of society on a national and secular basis. It
contributed to the development of an image of national culture and
to a defense of the nation-state as a culture. In this period, then,
the growth of technical, intellectual autonomy developed simul-
taneously with strongly nationalistic identifications by academicians.
Academic autonomy comes to be the freedom of each intellectual

136 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

specialty to hold its own special intellectual standards within (and
tacitly limited by) a larger loyalty to the essential institutions of
the social order of the nation. Even as they were making claim to
intellectual autonomy, the classical sociologists also were express-
ing strongly nationalistic sentiments, and in 1914 they enthusi-
astically supported their nations at war. However strong their
claims to intellectual autonomy, the classical academic sociologists
rarely manifested autonomy from the claims of the nation-state.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the political sphere’s au-
tonomy from religion was widely secure in Western Europe, and
the states could thus assume a new modus vivendi with the estab-
lished religions. This secularized autonomy of the state from re-
ligious institutions was, in some part, carried forward by the state’s
mobilization of the university as an independent font of culture and
ideology: the university had been coopted by the state. The “au-
tonomy” of the university thus, in part, grew out of the state’s need
for an ally in developing its autonomy from religious establish-
ments. Paradoxically, the autonomy of the university was and is, in
large part, an expression of the support given it and hence of its
dependence on the state. Once having established its autonomy
from religious establishments, the state wished to consolidate the
loyalty of its religious constituency and so did not wash to act pro-
vocatively toward religious establishments.

As the university became linked with the state and infused with
nationalistic sentiments, it began to be penetrated by the socialist
movement of student radicals, on the one hand, and by socialists
of “the chair,” on the other. The new Academic Sociology, then,
became constrained to relate to socialism and Marxism within a
university structure that was tied to the state. Academic Sociology
therefore launched a scholarly critique of socialism and Marxism,
to come to grips with them in intellectual terms. Much of the focus
of this discussion, evidenced by Durkheim’s lectures on socialism,
aimed at distinguishing and separating sociology from socialism.
In short, sociology was acting to prevent itself from being “con-
fused” with socialism by the public and the state.

There was thus a growing structural differentiation between
Academic Sociology and socialism (as W'ell as religion) in the
Classical period, and this, as Irving M. Zeitlin’s work elaborates, 19
has had enduring consequences for the scholarly efforts of the
classical sociologists. This structural differentiation of sociology
and socialism was radically different from their manifest fusion by
the Saint-Simonians of the Positivist period. Moreover, in the Clas-
sical period, the de facto split between sociology and Marxism
attained a new level of mutual and polemical self-awareness, with

An Historical Model of Structural Development 137

intellectual and character-defining consequences for Academic
Sociology itself.

The earlier emergence of Marxism had produced a sociological
synthesis that was strongly critical of established, religions and
established states and that had denned both of these as mechanisms
for maintaining the existing class system. Academic Sociology,
however, accommodated itself to the spiritual claims of established
religions and to the expectation of loyalty by the nation-state, by
renouncing all claims to itself assert ultimate values, whether
religious or political. Sociology became “value free," presumably
concerned only with what was rather than with what should be
and therebv made itself less suspect both to established religions
and to the state. Max Webers explicit manifesto on behalf of a
value-free conception of sociology expressly articulated what Durk-
heim had clearly but only implicitly moved toward. The emerging
conception of Academic Sociology as a value-free discipline, along
with a tendencv to define sociology as an analytically distinct
specialization, combined to encourage a politics of academic ecu-
menism. This promised, in effect, that sociology would tolerate the
claims cf other interests in and out of the university, in return for
their toleration of sociology's now truncated ambitions. In short.
Academic Sociology entrenched itself in the university by accom-
modating itself to the political and religious status quo.

It was cut of this accommodation in the Classical period that the
modem structure of Academic Sociology arose with its character-
istic focus on the existential (that is. what is or had been) and its
avoidance of overt, focalized treatment of the normative (that is.
what men should do) along with its correspondingly delimited and
specialized structure of emerging professional roles. The Positivists
of the first period had divided the social world into two orders, the
temporal and the spiritual, and had claimed authority in the latter.
The Marxists had unmasked the social role cf religion, and then
chose to seek power directly, in the political sphere. It was left to
sociology in the Classical period to renounce influence in both the
spiritual and temporal orders. Its tacit slogan became: give unto
both Caesar and the priest the things that are theirs.

Despite sociology’s increasing integration into and acceptance bv
modem society in this period, classical sociologists nonetheless had
a growing presentiment that there was something deeplv wrong
with modem industrial societies. It was a feeling shared bv both
Durkheim and Weber, from whose standpoints the dangerous
pathologies were, respectively, anomie and bureaucratization. In
France this pessimism was inhibited and repressed by that nation’s
traditionally more optimistic and rational culture. In Germanv.

138 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

however, there was a long tradition of pessimism; optimism was
widely associated with intellectual superficiality and pessimism
with intellectual seriousness: the optimist was rarely judged "deep.”
Nietzsche’s “gay science” was no exception, of course; it allowed
optimism only as the grimace of those who could endure the
premise of an “eternal recurrence”; it was the desperate "optimism”
of the dancer on the grave.

PERIOD IV: PARSONSIAN STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONALISM

The fourth, the modem period in the intellectual synthesis of
sociological thought emerged in the late ig3o’s in the United
States. It gathered momentum in the midst of the greatest inter-
national economic crisis that capitalism has known. Sociological
Positivism was the Academic Sociology that corresponded to pre-
Marxian Utopian Socialism. Classical Sociology was the Academic
Sociology that corresponded to and confronted the rise of Marxism,
socialism, and their subsequent development of revisionism and
reformism. Parsonian Structural-Functionalism corresponds to the
period of the communist seizure of state power in Russia and to
the subsequent intellectual stasis of Marxism that accompanied
the rise of Stalinism. It is rooted in a time when Marxism has
achieved state sponsorship and when socialism has come to power
in a vast Eurasian land.

STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONALISM AS A SYNTHESIS OF
FRENCH FUNCTIONALISM AND GERMAN ROMANTICISM

Parsons’ work began by syncretizing the “spiritual” component
of German Romanticism, which focused on the inward orientation
of the actor, with the French tradition of Functional theory; how-
ever, it was the Romantic component that Parsons first stressed
by characterizing his earliest synthesis as “voluntarist.” Parsons’
theory thus contained two historically and culturally distinct atti-
tudes that coexist in a tensionful relationship. There was French
revisionist social utilitarianism, in which social arrangements are
explained in terms of their imputed usefulness for or function in
the larger group or society, which is seen as a “system” of inter-
acting elements. Also there was the Romantic importance attributed
to moral or value elements, where behavior is accounted for by

An Historical Model of Structural Development 139

efforts to conform with an internalized moral code and where, it is
emphasized, men need pay no heed to consequences but seek to
conform to the code for its own sake. Parsons’ combination of
Functionalism and voluntarism was a reflection, within the idiom
of technical social theory, of the continuing conflict in bourgeois
culture between utility and morality or “natural rights,” and it was
an effort to confront and resolve this cultural conflict on the theo-
retical level.

Parsons added a distinctively American emphasis to the tradition
of German Romanticism. This Romanticism had stressed the “in-
ward” significance of ideals that were seen as shaping the private
life of the mind within which — in contrast to the public and politi-
cal spheres — it was felt that true freedom resided. Since Parsons
came to German Romanticism largely through Max Weber, who
had stressed the worldly consequences of certain ideals, he was
alerted to the role of ideas as stimulants to outward or public
action, striving, and achievement. Parsons went beyond Weber,
moving toward a still more Americanized version of Romanticism,
by stressing the melioristic potential in the successful acting out of
one’s values. Parsons thus rejected the pessimism that had long
tinged German Romanticism and whose gloom had deepened in
the post-Bismarckian and post-Schopenhauerian period; he crystal-
lized a more optimistic and more activistic formulation of socio-
logical Romanticism. In short, Parsons Americanized German
sociological Romanticism.

Following World War II there was a tendency in American
sociology to return to a more social utilitarianism, both in Parsons’
own work and in Functional theory more generally. Parsons’ later
work, especially T he Social System (1951), placed a relatively
great stress on the importance of the gratifying outcome of indi-
vidual conformity -with values, and on the contributions of diverse
social structures or processes to the integration of social systems.
His concern for the usefulness of certain social or cultural arrange-
ments for system equilibrium became focal while his earlier stress
on the energizing character of values became subsidiary.

About the same time, Robert K. Merton’s version of Functional-
ism also manifested a tendency to restore social utilitarianism.
Merton treated the subjective orientations of persons (the volun-
taristic component) in a completely “secularized” manner; viewing
them as just one among many analytic considerations and devoid
of any special pathos, he explicitly took the functional conse-
quences of various social patterns as his point of departure. This
return to a revisionist social utilitarianism in postwar American
sociology was then largely completed in George Homans’ theory
rooted in a mercantile metaphor of “exchange.” Homans focused

1 40 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

on the individual gratifications “exchange” provided, and he treated
moral values as themselves emergents of ongoing exchanges.- Here
Romanticism received its coup de grace from a Spencerian Posi-
tivism allied with Skinnerian Behaviorism and American “tough-
mindedness.” It is the most unabashedly individualistic utilitarian-
ism in modern sociology. The wave of theorizing that had begun
as a form of anti-utilitarianism in the United States during the late
1930’s thus relapsed into social and even individualistic utilitarian-
ism following World War II.

Still there is no doubt that so far as Parsons’ own work is con-
cerned, moral values are always viewed with a special pathos and
are always attributed a special importance. He continues to stress
moral values, although moving from a more Weberian view that
emphasizes their role as energizers of action to a more Durkhejmian
view that emphasizes their role as sources of social order. Parsons
never allows moral values to become just one other variable in the
social equation. Paradoxically, however, neither does he ever mount
a full-scale and systematic exploration of the nature and function-
ing of moral values. But this is not peculiar to him.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF MORALS: A STRUCTURAL LACUNA IN SOCIOLOGY

The internal structure of sociology may be usefully characterized
in terms of what it does not do and in terms of what it excludes.
In addition to sociology’s systematic neglect of economic factors,
there is another generally evident intellectual omission from the
internal structure of academic sociological practice: this is the
absence of a sociology of morals or values. Despite the fact that
Academic Sociology, beginning with Sociological Positivism, had
hailed the significance of shared moral values, despite the fact that
Emile Durkheim had called for and promised to create such a
sociology of morals, and despite the fact that a concern with moral
values was central to Max Weber’s sociology of religion as well as
to Talcott Parsons’ “voluntaristic” theory, there still remains no
concentration of scholarship that might be called a “sociology of
moral values” and would correspond in cumulative development to
specialized areas, such as the study of social stratification, role
analysis, political sociology, let alone to criminology or to family
studies.

This omission is paradoxical because the concerns of Academic
Sociology, seen as a patterned arrangement of scholarly energies
and attention, have traditionally emphasized the importance of
moral values both for the solidarity of societies and for the well-
being of individuals. Structurally, then, Academic Sociology is

An Historical Model of Structural Development 141

characterized both by the importance it attributes to values and
by its failure to develop — in its characteristic manner which trans-
forms almost everything into a specialization — a distinctive soci-
ology of moral values. This omission is, I believe, due largely to the
fact that a full-scale analysis of moral values would tend to under-
mine their autonomy. Both sides of this paradoxical structure of
sociology, however, constitute important problems that can be
most fully understood in Talcott Parsons’ social theory; I therefore
propose to defer further discussion of it until I can address myself
to Parsons’ work in some detail.

STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONALISM IN THE CONTEXT
OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

The anti-utilitarianism of Parsons’ prewar theory must be related
to its historical context in the Great Depression, while its postwar
drift back toward social utilitarianism must be seen in its own,
different historical milieu. As I shall later show more fully, Parsons’
early anti-utilitarian or “voluntaristic” theory was, in part, a re-
sponse to the social conflicts and demoralization bom of the Great
Depression. Its stress on the importance of moral ideals was a call
to hold fast to those traditional values that called for individual
striving in the fact of crisis-induced instigation to change or reject
them.

In the 1930’s the economic system had broken down. It could
no longer produce the massive daily gratifications that helped to
hold middle-class society together and foster commitment to its
values. If the society was to be held together and its cultural pat-
terns maintained — as Parsons clearly wished — one was constrained
to look for noneconomic sources of social integration. In the time-
worn manner of the conservative. Parsons looked to individual
moral commitment to cement society. Parsons’ voluntaristic soci-
ology did not consider the crisis soluble in terms of the New Deal’s
welfare efforts, so, in effect, it concerned itself with what was
necessary to integrate the society despite mass deprivation. Parsons
expected that morality might cement the society without changes
in economic institutions and without redistributions of income and
power that might threaten established privileges. In short, Parsons’
theory was not congenial — and was, indeed, hostile — to the emerg-
ing Welfare State.

Then, of course, came the war. Unlike the period of the Great
Depression the state could then act in the name of an all-embracing
national unity. It could and did call upon sociologists to use their
technical skills on behalf of the collectivity; many sociologists

142 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

began to be employed by the federal bureaucracy. American soci-
ologists acquired a firsthand and gratifying experience with the
power, prestige, and resources of the state apparatus. From that
time forward, their relationship with the state was a closer one.

During the war and after it, prosperity returned, at least for the
middle class; American society was reknit by affluence and by war-
induced solidarity. The working class and its unions became in-
creasingly integrated into the society; the sense of an imminent
threat to public order disappeared. Yet many retained a sense of
the precariousness of the system that even the new affluence could
not completely dissipate; the cleavages of the Great Depression had
been repaired but not forgotten. Moreover, New Deal legislation
had created new expectations and vested interests among middle-
class professionals as well as among the working class, which had
acquired a glimpse of what the state might do for them. The
Welfare State was, in short, here to stay. Following the war it
gradually became involved with problems of racial inequities.

With the return of affluence and a growing Welfare State, the
maintenance of social order in postwar America no longer needed
to rely so exclusively upon moral incentives. Furthermore, in the
postwar affluence the more fluid "collective” behavior of the depres-
sion receded, and there was less of an intensive street life and
on-the-road existence. Social life ebbed back into more clearly
defined structures (buildings, offices, and factories) and into more
traditional styles of politics: the daily rhythms of social life once
again became routine. To see society in terms of firm, clearly de-
fined structures, as Parsons’ new theory did, was now not dissonant
with the collective experience, the shared personal reality, of daily
life. The new structural vision of Parsons’ work, like a leaning
tower built of concept piled on concept, corresponded to a period
of social recoalescence that retained an abiding, though latent sense
of the powerful potentialities of disorder. The Great Depression had
glaringly revealed the possibilities of social catastrophe. But with
success in war and the return of affluence, Parsons’ confidence in
the society seemed vindicated, and he mobilized himself for the
Herculean labor of tidying up the residual social debris. Driven
toward an all-inclusive comprehensiveness by an impulse to fill
in all the empty spaces, he began to seek a conceptual place for
everything in society and to put everything in some conceptualized
place; it was search for intellectual order that manifests a certain
frenetic character.

The second phase of Parsons’ work parallels the accelerated con-
solidation of the Welfare State. In this period his emphasis is
initially placed on society as a social system composed of interact-
ing institutions and other components. In the first, prewar period

An Historical Model of Structural Development 143

his emphasis had been on the role of values, particularly on the
energizing role of values : the voluntaristic dimension. Despite his
involvement in Harvard’s Paretian circle during the 1930’s, Parsons’
conception of society qua system had then only been sketched. It
was in the postwar period, however, that it was first fully elaborated
and seen as a self-maintaining, homeostatic system. Later on, and
by the 1960’s, this “system” focus gradually comes into conflict
with emphases that call for political priorities which assign power-
ful initiatives to the state. Moreover, in his second period Parsons
also elaborated the complex variety of specific mechanisms that
contribute directly to the internal stability of a society, which goes
well beyond the mere affirmation of the importance of shared
values as a source of societal stability.

In the prewar period, then, Parsons had focused on moral values
as inward stimuli to social action, as energizers of individual effort.
In a way, this early period had focused on the importance of main-
taining the sheer vitality of the system; it was above all a fight
against the entropy of cultural patterns and against the waning
of individual loyalty to them; the fundamental support for cultural
patterns was seen to reside in the inward moral convictions of
individuals.

In the second period, however, the security of the social system
was now seen as more dependent upon its own special devices, upon
the operation of various, autonomous mechanisms of system inte-
gration and accommodation, and less on the will, drive, or com-
mitment of persons. Moving from a focus upon individuals,
Parsons now was concerned with how the social system as such
maintains its own coherence, fits individuals into its mechanisms
and institutions, arranges and socializes them to provide what the
system requires. Moral conviction and inwardness of commitment
are now seen as system-derived and produced; the focus is no
longer on what moral conviction produces but rather on how it is
produced by the socializing mechanisms of the system. Thus the
reliance on largely moral incentives as the mainspring of social
solidarity is reduced in the postwar period, when there is renewed
affluence and when, in consequence, other inducements to con-
formity and social solidarity have been refurbished. An emphasis
on voluntaristic individual commitment is supplanted by a reliance
on the “socialization” of individuals to produce the choices the
system requires.

In the postwar period Parsons saw system-equilibrium as a
derivative of system initiatives and processes, as resting essentially
on the conformity that all give to the legitimate expectations of
each other. This was a vision of societal solidarity that fit in with
the Welfare State’s practical interest in finding ways to produce

144 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

loyalty and conformity and with its operating assumption that the
stability of society is strengthened by conforming with the “legiti-
mate” expectations of deprived social strata which, in turn, are
then expected to have a willing conformity with conventional
morality. The operating assumption is that deprived strata will be
“grateful” for the aid they • are given — rather than assuming, as
Durkheim had, that men are inherently insatiable — and that they
will therefore conform willingly to the expectations of the giver.
In some respects, then, the postwar phase of Parsonsianism was
rather consistent with the requirements and assumptions of a
Welfare State. As I shall indicate later, however, there were im-
portant ways in which Parsonsianism remained a pre-Keynesian
sociology, still moored in an earlier image of a social order held
together by spontaneous processes, and thus by no means fully
corresponded to the Welfare State’s instrumental interest in social
order or, for that matter, with its other disposition toward justice
and equality.

THE GENERAL CRISIS OF MIDDLE-CLASS SOCIETY AND PARSONSIANISM

The Parsonsian synthesis grew out of the deep crisis in middle-
class societies, which had historically been developing well before
the Great Depression. This crisis was pervasive, general, and acute;
it was economic and political; it was domestic and international.
Prior to the Parsonsian synthesis, the crisis had unfolded itself in
four major convulsions, each with world-wide ramification:

(i) World War I, which undermined the middle class’s con-
fidence in the inevitability of progress, destroyed old nation-states
and created new ones throughout Europe, increased American
influence in Europe, undermined mass confidence in the old elites,
and set the stage for (2) the Soviet Revolution, which for a period,
intensified the revolutionary potential in Western and Central
Europe, acutely heightened anxieties among the Euro-American
middle class, began to polarize international tensions around the
United States and the Soviet Union, and, converging with growing
nationalism in underdeveloped areas and particularly in Asia, un-
dermined the colonial empires of the victorious Western powers;
(3) the Rise of Fascism in Italy and especially of Nazism in Ger-
many, which signaled that the European middle class’s anxieties
had become a panic that undermined social and political stability
throughout the continent; (4) the international economic crisis of
the 1930’s, which, overlapping with the third wave, created mass
unemployment among the working class, acute deprivation to small
farmers, sharp status anxieties and economic threats to the middle

An Historical Model of Structural Development 145

class, and finally accelerated the growth of the Welfare State in the
United States. With the United States’ involvement in the world
economic crisis, the international stronghold of the world middle
class had been breached.

Parsonsianism does not simply emerge at this specific time, but
it emerges also in a specific place. Harvard University. Its emer-
gence there tokened a regional and cultural shift in the center of
gravity of Academic Sociology in the United States. Sociolog)’ now
developed in, and was influenced by, the culture of the Eastern
Seaboard rather than that of the American Midwest, in which it
had previously developed at Chicago University. Eastern Seaboard
culture tends to be somewhat less localistic, parochial, isolationist,
and less “down to earth”; it is, correspondingly, more “intellectual-
istic,” more national, and more international in its orientations.
In particular. Eastern Seaboard culture has a greater sensitivity to
happenings in Europe.

Parsonsianism, in fine, developed in an era when the anxieties
of the middle class in different nations came to be shared; these
anxieties were focused on a common international danger, the
emergence of Communist power in the Soviet Union, as well as on
a common international economic crisis, the Great Depression of
the ig3o’s. If the Classical period of sociological synthesis reflected
a set of parallel tensions that were viewed by the middle class in
terms of national particularities, the Parsonsian era reflected a
general, Euro-American crisis of the international middle class. It
reflected the common concerns of relatively advanced or "devel-
oped” industrial societies whose elites defined their problem pri-
marily in terms of their common need to maintain “social order.”

Social theory could not be relevant to this world crisis if it were
formulated solely in terms of (1) social problems in individual
institutional sectors, each treated in isolation from the other, or in
terms of (2) a monographic historiography that focused scholar-
ship on the special traditions of different nations, their unique
types of culture, or their varying levels of industrialization. If social
theory was to be revelant to the common problems of such diverse
societies, it had to take the problem of social order as central, and it
had to be constructed in a relatively abstract manner. The empirical
emptiness and abstractness of the Parsonsian analysis of social
order reflected an effort to respond to the existence of an inter-
national crisis that simultaneously threatened the middle class in
capitalist countries on different levels of industrialization and with
different political traditions. Despite their many other differences,
European societies could then be seen as facing a similar problem,
the problem of order, and as having certain crucial likenesses
rather than as differentiated national societies: they could more

146 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

readily be seen, in short, as “cases” in an abstract “social system.”

Any sociological synthesis that aimed at being relevant to any
one of these societies also had to be applicable to the others. The
thrust of sociological synthesis was thus pushed to the highest and
most abstract level of generalization. The resultant paradox: the
more the theoretical synthesis probed toward the true generality of
the existing crisis and was capable of coping with international
variety, the more irrelevant it seemed to the crisis as it was experi-
enced in any of the nations involved. This was a central paradox of
Parsonsianism.

This paradox has lead to a vast misunderstanding of Parsons’
work, one which is particularly common in the interpretations of it
by liberal sociologists. These critics frequently assert that Parsons’
theory lacks concern for problems of contemporary relevance,
meaning, I suppose, that it does not directly focus on social
problems manifest in the everyday world: for example, poverty,
race, war, economic development or underdevelopment. There is
a sense in which this criticism is true; but there is a more im-
portant sense in which it misses the point. For, the insistence with
which Parsons focused on the problem of “social order,” most
generally conceived, implied that he, rather than his liberal critics,
had in fact glimpsed the true extent of the modern crisis; at least
he saw it in its full depth, even though defining it from a singularly
conservative perspective, as a problem of the maintenance of
order.

Parsons’ liberal critics reveal their own limitations when they
fail to see that there are historical eras when the crisis of social
order is general and manifest. The depression of the 1930’s, which
existed when Parsons was writing The Structure of Social Action,
was such an era. It was a time of mass meetings, marches, demon-
strations, shotgun auctions, protests, petitions, welfare demands,
militant organizations, street corner meetings, and riots: it was
a time of widespread collective unrest. From the conservative
standpoint such a period is viewed as an acute threat to social
order; from a radical standpoint, however, the time may be seen
as one of revolutionary opportunity. The problem of social order,
then, is the conservative’s way of talking about the conditions when
an established elite is unable to rule in traditional ways and when
there is a crisis of the master institutions.

However conservative his formulation, Parsons was absolutely
correct in insisting that the problem of social order in our time is
not merely an academic problem but one of abiding and con-
temporary relevance. Parsons had seen more deeply into the
precariousness of modem society than most of his critics. Unlike
some of his critics who, as liberal technologues, view “problems

An Historical Model of Structural Development 147

of contemporary relevance” as capable of being resolved if only
enough money and expertise are mobilized. Parsons’ vision of the
contemporary social condition saw that it embodied a more total
and general problem that would not be so easily engineered away.

Parsons’ shortcoming, therefore, was not that he failed to engage
problems of contemporary relevance but that he continued to view
them from the standpoint of an American optimism. Because he
saw them from this optimistic standpoint, he one-sidedly empha-
sized the adaptability of the status quo, considering the ways in
which it was open to change rather than the manner in which its
own characteristics were inducing the disorder and resisting adap-
tation to it. But for all his optimism, Parsons — unlike his liberal
critics — had glimpsed the true depth of the contemporary problem.
His abiding optimism, however, led him to believe that the present
institutions were viable, that the status quo had not been played out
but still had time and resources commensurate to the crisis. Par-
sons’ confidence in the status quo was also buoyed by his sense of
the vulnerability of its critics and their alternatives: if things were
bad here, they were not manifestly better elsewhere. Parsons’ opti-
mism led him to no facile solutions, and he never viewed the
agony of his culture, in the manner of liberal technologues, as an
occasion to vaunt a brittle technical expertise.

But there is a paradox here that must be faced: How was it that
Parsons could remain an optimist, although he had seen so deeply
into the contemporary crisis? It is not enough to invoke general
American conditions and the prevalence of optimism in American
culture. We must also examine the concrete manner in which
history and culture intersect with individual biography. In short,
we must come closer to the individuated way in which culture
becomes embedded in personal reality and influences theory.

The vital statistic here is that Parsons was bom in igo2. This
means, first, that he did not experience World War I as an adult,
being only twelve when it began and only fifteen when the United
States entered it. Second, this means that Parsons was a mature
man of twenty-seven when the stock market crash of 1929 heralded
the coming of the Great Depression. Parsons had, in short, grown
to manhood during the booming economic prosperity in the United
States of the 1920’s. His education had been completed (A.B.,
Amherst, and Ph.D., Heidelberg) two years before the economic
crisis started. By 1929 Parsons had been married and on the faculty
of Harvard for two years.

In other words: some of the most fundamental aspects of
Parsons’ personal reality had been shaped by the economic pros-
perity of the 1920’s, during which time his own personal prospects
and position coincided with the general success of the American

148 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

economy. It was thus not simply that Parsons had witnessed the
“success” of the American economy as an outsider, but that as an
Instructor at Harvard and as the son of a college president he also
participated in it. Much of Parsons’ abiding optimism, I would
suggest, is rooted in the fact that he viewed the Great Depression
from a specific perspective: from the standpoint of a personal
reality that had been formed by the experience of success. Parsons
encountered the Great Depression as an adult who had already
started a career at America’s most prominent university. By 1929
Parsons was by no means professionally prominent; yet he was
about as successful as a young academician bom in Colorado
Springs, Colorado, might expect to be.

Seen in the light of the prosperity of the 1920’s, the Great
Depression seemed to many like a bad dream, frightening but
unreal, which in time would go away. With the advent of World
War II, it did. For Parsons, then, the Great Depression was an inter-
lude between the prosperity of the 1920’s and the later American
triumph in World War II and postwar affluence. Linked to the
experiences of a powerful and successful middle class, Parsons’
optimism was the optimism of those for whom success, of and in
the system, was the fundamental personal reality and for whom
its failure was an aberration not quite personally real.

INTERNATIONALIZATION OF ACADEMIC SOCIOLOGY

The great thinkers of the Classical period were not only politi-
cally but also culturally nationalist in experience and orientation;
indeed, even their own social theories were often developed in
ignorance of relevant work in other countries. The ignorance
Weber and Durkheim had of each other’s work is the most notable
case in point. Parsons, however, began the assimilation of the
hitherto nationally fragmented expressions of European social
theory. This entailed a synthesis of Western European social theory
within the framework of an American structure of sentiments,
assumptions, and personal reality. Parsons did not simply repro-
duce or transplant European theory into American culture like an
emigre; he profoundly destructured, assimilated, and resynthesized
it in terms of the different American experience. His synthesis
became viable in American academic life while remaining relevant
to European culture. It could thus serve as a bridge between Euro-
pean and American intellectual life and as a major step in the
internationalization of Academic Sociology.

There is little question but that the crisis of the 1930’s inten-
sified American academic interest in European social theory and

An Historical Model of Structural Development 149

brought it to the center of intellectual controversy. In particular,
the crisis of the 1930’s led some American academicians to look
to European Academic Sociolog}' as a defense against the Marxism
that was recently penetrating American campuses, for Europeans
had far longer experience with it. European social theory was
thrown into the breach against the crisis-generated interest in
Marxism. It was with such ideologically shaped expectations that
a group of Harvard scholars, which centered on L. J. Henderson
and included Parsons, George Homans, and Crane Brinton, formed
a seminar on Vilfredo Pareto, which began to meet in the fall of
1932 and met regularly until 1934. 20 Also attending were R. K.
Merton, Henry Murray, and Clyde Kluckhohn.

The political implications of the circle’s interest in Pareto were
expressed by George Homans, who candidly acknowledged — Mr.
Homans never says anything except with forceful candor — that
“as a Republican Bostonian who had not rejected his comparatively
wealthy family, I felt during the thirties that I was under personal
attack, above all from the Marxists. I was ready to believe Pareto
because he provided me with a defense.” 21 The nature of this
defense may, in part, be glimpsed in Homans’ 1936 article, ‘The
Making of a Communist,” where he argued that a "society is an
organism and . . . like all organisms, if a threat be made to its mode
of existence, a society will produce antibodies which tend to restore
it to its original form.” 22 Here, then, was their rationale for opti-
mism and conservativism even in the midst of the great crisis.

The location of the Pareto circle in the political spectrum was
clearly indicated by Crane Brinton, who remarked that “at Harvard
in the thirties there was certainly, led by Henderson, what the
Communists or fellow'-travellers or even just mild American-style
liberals in the University used to call ‘the Pareto cult.’ ” Pareto him-
self w-as then called, as Brinton notes, “The Marx of the Bour-
geoisie” when he was not, somewhat less grandly, simply termed
a fascist. In short, the Pareto circle took a political position far over
on the conservative right, placing itself in opposition not simply
to Communists but also to “mild American-style liberals The inter-
nationalization of American Academic Sociology thus began on a
politically conservative, anti-Marxist basis. The Pareto circle was
clearly searching for a theoretical defense against Marxism, and
this aspect of their attraction to Pareto was by no means thrust
back into the dimmer regions of subsidiary aw r areness.

Being a member neither of Harvard’s Society of Fellow's nor of
Boston’s exclusive Saturday Club — Henderson and Brinton be-
longed to both, Homans only to the Society — Parsons seems to
have been not quite nuclear to the circle, although he was very
close to Henderson. His own anti-Marxist position was therefore

150 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

somewhat different from — less parochial and earlier than — that of
the other members of the seminar. Indeed, Parsons had already
been familiarized with the European critics of Marxism, particu-
larly Max Weber, during his European studies, which were prior to
the depression and to his membership in the Pareto circle. In
short, Parsons had his theoretical ammunition in hand before the
target came into view on the American scene.

Yet, despite the political and ideological motives that animated
American interests in anti-Marxist European theorists, there were
important ways in which the Americans’ relation to this European
tradition remained an external one. While Parsons and others were
fully alert to the ideological significance of this European critique,
they assimilated it from the standpoint of an American culture in
which the socialist tradition and experience were, despite the
current upsurge, still little known at first hand. The specific intel-
lectual issues, the changing political conflicts and historical para-
digms, on which the European response to socialism rested, were
not really a part of the cultural and personal reality of American
sociologists. The Marxism they knew was largely known as theory
and not as a familiar political expression or embodiment.

Political and intellectual traditions in the United States had not
fastened academic attention on the challenge of Marxism as com-
pulsively as it had in Europe. The American theoretical response to
the crisis was therefore not impelled to remain locked in a close
confrontation with Marxism that would narrowly limit the terms
of its rejoinder; and the Americans could use the full variety of
the intellectual weapons that had been stored in the European
armory. Parsons, therefore, never engaged himself as directly and
deeply with Marxism as had the Europeans. He never really came
to a conception of its full analytic complexity and, indeed, had
committed himself to a view on Marxism before he had any sensi-
tivity to its own internal development. There is little doubt that
Parsons has always had a better acquaintance with Marx’s critics
than with Marx himself. In the 793 pages of his Structure of Social
Action, Parsons makes not a single reference to the original writings
of Marx or Engels, citing only secondary sources. Seeing Marxism
primarily as an obsolescent intellectual system rather than as a
living culture, as akin more to Hobbes, Locke, or Malthus than to
Durkheim, Parsons took his approach to Marxism from the con-
clusions but not the experience of Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and
Sombart. For these scholars Marxism had been a living culture, and
their struggle against it was embedded in their own personal reality.
For Parsons, however, Marxism was primarily a cultural record, a
thing of books that was never built deeply into his personal reality.
Not bound to a tradition of detailed Marxist criticism, the Parsonsian

An Historical Model of Structural Development 151

synthesis could be formulated in more abstract terms. Parsons
could start with the conclusions of the classical European critique
of Marxism and, picking up where these had stopped, could move
on to a more general theory rather than pursuing narrow, detailed,
historical study in the European manner.

POSITIVISM AND PABSONS: FROM SCIENTISM TO PROFESSIONALISM

At the beginning of this chapter I briefly described the historical
conditions surrounding the emergence of sociological Positivism,
with a view to understanding certain of the social forces that
helped shape it. The restoration context of Positivism may also help
to provide some historical perspective on the social conditions that
led Talcott Parsons — perhaps more than any other social theorist
since Comte — to undertake the formulation of a comprehensive
Grand Theory. An understanding of this may be illuminated by
noting certain of the important similarities between the periods
in which each worked. The most important of these, in my view, is
that there was in each period a sharp conflict, a conflict that did not
simply involve relatively limited questions about a few issues, but
entailed a confrontation between two sharply different and com-
prehensive mappings of the social order as a whole. In the 1930’s
one mapping was the traditional free-enterprise image of the middle
class in the United States and the other was that offered, first, by
Marxism and, second, by the New Deal.

In the America of the 1930's, Marxism was a perspective attrac-
tive to only a minority, though it was generally an articulate and
energetic minority of intellectuals whose views were clearly visible,
within the universities and elsewhere. In this the middle-class map
of society was challenged in a most comprehensive manner, and,
even though American Marxists were not themselves politically
powerful in the United States, they were often associated with a
powerful political embodiment of Marxism, the Soviet Union. On
a different level, however, the conventional middle-class map was
also challenged by the extensive New Deal reforms. While these
constituted a far less radical challenge than that presented by
Marxism, they were frightening because they were politically
powerful, a govemmentally sponsored alternative. The extensive
changes in welfare arrangements, employment practices, labor
relations, and in industrial and banking organization that were
proposed or enacted by the New Deal were often far more threaten-
ing to parts of the middle class than even the actual economic
breakdown itself. In certain middle-class quarters hatred of “that
man” Roosevelt sometimes attained paranoiac proportions, even

152 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

though the point of New Deal reforms was to stabilize the estab-
lished system in its essentials rather than overturn it. The abrupt-
ness of the acceleration toward a Welfare State had made some
feel that “society as they knew it” was under radical attack.

Although Marxism and the New Deal represented very different
alternatives to traditional social mappings, anxieties about each
resonated and amplified anxieties about the other. Anxiety about
communism led sectors of the middle class to view the New Deal
as more radical than it was, while anxiety about the New Deal led
them to view communism as more powerful than it was in the
United States. As some viewed it, the New Deal was merely a
disguise and opening wedge for international communism. Fused
as the two sometimes seemed, traditional middle-class mappings
of society thus often seemed to be under attack by an alternative
that was both radical and powerful. Thus the real conflict between
alternative social maps, which was in fact sharper than it had been
in the United States since the Civil War, came to be seen in some
quarters as even more acute than it was. The question of the basic
character of the social order in its totality often became a matter
of extensive public concern and of articulate and visible debate
among many intellectuals. The stability and legitimacy of the
traditional social order in the United States of the 1930’s was no
longer taken for granted in anything like the manner that it had
previously been.

It is in this respect that there was important structural similarity
between Restoration society and American society during the
1930’s; in each case the situation was conducive to an effort to
provide a comprehensive new mapping of the social order, to
clarify its essential elements, to estimate its resources for progress
and its prospects for recovery, and to define the sources and con-
ditions of its legitimacy.

Faced with an international and domestic crisis of the most
acute sort, for the solution of which their services were not at first
sought by public authorities. Parsons and his students began their
long march into the inner resources of theory. The crisis of the
1930’s gave them few career inducements and little research fund-
ing that might have stimulated them to engage themselves with it
directly and have diverted them from theory building. There were
few opportunities for Parsons and his students to engage in “social
engineering” as sociologists, even had they felt this feasible and
desirable. As it was, however, Parsons’ ideological and theoretical
bent — conservative in politics and laissez faire in its Paretian
implications — did not lead them to believe that such intervention
was needed or desirable. Those of more liberal persuasion might
and did engage themselves as professionals in governmental

An Historical Model of Structural Development 153

service; but, what could have been done by academic conservatives
who rejected the New Deal, and how could they have formulated
their work to enhance its practical relevance to the problems of the
time?

In some part, then, the Parsonsian withdrawal into technical
theory was an expression of the impotence of a conservative out-
look during this American crisis. The technical involution of
Parsonsian theory was contingent on the lack of external oppor-
tunity that might have attracted it to social engineering as well as
on its own ideological character and commitments.

But the point here is not the specific ideological character of
Parsonsianism, that is, its conservatism; the more important point
is that the political impotence of any ideological position may be-
come an inducement to compensatory theoretical effort. It is partly,
but not simply, that men engaged in active politics usually have
little time for extended theorizing. The other fundamental point is
that self-involved and technically-engrossed theorizing is an activity
that for some intellectuals, whatever their ideology, is self-
sustaining when the time is out of joint for their political ideologies,
be it too late or too early, and when they need to compensate for
failure, defeat, or neglect. It is the politically defeated or the his-
torically checkmated who write intensive, technically complex
social theory. Such Grand Social Theory is thus, in part, a sub-
stitute for politics.

Plato, for example, makes this plain in his seventh Epistle, where
he explicitly indicates that he turned to philosophy after his ex-
pectations of a political career were disappointed and when neither
the oligarchy nor the democracy in Athens satisfied him. Again, the
first period of the Positivist sociological synthesis is partly rooted,
as I have indicated, in the work of a declassed nobility, the Counts
DeBonald, de Maistre, and Saint-Simon, and in the efforts of a
nascent technical intelligentsia which was literally disenfranchised.
Again, as revealed in the letters he wrote to Saint-Simon in breaking
off their relationship, Comte wanted to retreat to a “pure” sociology,
feeling that practical men of affairs in his society did not have the
wit to understand sociology nor the inclination to honor the
sociologist. It is also notable that the most technically involved
period of Karl Marx’s own productivity largely followed the failure
of the Revolution of 1848. And the failure of Max Weber’s own
political ambitions — culminating in but not limited by his in-
ability to secure nomination for political office — is well known. In
all four major periods of sociological development, then, extended
and technically-engrossed social theorizing — and perhaps, particu-
larly, systematic, “grand” theorizing — has taken one of its motiva-
tions from political frustration and powerlessness.

154 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

Sociological Positivism of the early nineteenth century had de-
fined the modem society that was then emerging as “industrial”;
they had seen it as the culminating stage in an historical evolution
which would be perfected gradually. They believed, on the one
hand, that there were archaic social arrangements centering on
the elites of the old regime, that needed to be superseded and, on
the other, that there were lacunae in the modem arrangements
that needed to be filled in. They believed that the new society
needed to be integrated or as they repeatedly put it, “organized,”
and that this required a new moral code appropriate to the emerg-
ing industrial, technological, and scientific institutions of the new
order. Their central emphasis, however, was on the importance of
science: partly as an instrument for enhancing productivity and
thereby reducing dangerous mass discontent; partly as a method
through which men could be persuaded to a consensus in beliefs
that could integrate the new society; and partly as a commitment,
which, unlike sheer wealth, could lend legitimacy to the new in-
dustrial institutions and the new men of property who controlled
them. Science, for the Positivists, was to be the central source of
modem social integration and of the legitimacy of its new elites.

The Parsonsian response to the crisis of the 1930’s differed by
reason of the different position of the American middle class, the
difference in the threats with which it had to contend, and the
differences in the bases of its legitimacy and, in particular, in the
role of science as a base of legitimation. In the United States of
the 1930’s science and technology were, of course, deeply en-
trenched commonplaces of daily life. Yet, while deeply entrenched,
they were not altogether unproblematic, for in consequence of the
depression they had lost in public credit; in fact, some people then
held that the depression itself was attributable to the overproduc-
tion caused by a too rapid technological development. Indeed, there
was even talk of declaring a moratorium on scientific and techno-
logical development. In short, science was being seen as a source
of trouble. The American middle class’s association with science
was therefore by no means sufficient to establish its legitimacy.

Moreover, the abrupt and devastating collapse of the American
economy in the 1930’s had sharply undermined the legitimacy of
the reigning American elite; the gap visible between power and
morality in public life was thus dangerously wide. And from
Parsons’ morality-sensitive perspective, it was precisely this im-
pairment of the middle class’s legitimacy that was one of the
primary problems. He thus set out in the midst of the Great
Depression to mend the rift between power and morality and to
find new bases of legitimacy for the American elite.

It is in the conclusions of these efforts that one can see some

An Historical Model of Structural Development 155

of the important differences between Parsons and the Positivists.
Parsons placed considerably less emphasis on science as a source
for elite legitimation and social integration; instead he gave a new
emphasis to “professionalism.” In his 1938 paper on the professions,
he noted that all of the elites of industrial society, businessmen no
less than scientists, were now regarded as forming “professions.”
Indeed, modem society as a whole, he said, was distinguished by
the importance of the professions, “which is, in any comparable
degree of development, unique in history.” 23 Here Parsons had
found a way of characterizing modern society without defining it,
as Marx had, as “capitalist” and, at the same time, without having
to stress its bureaucratic character, as had Weber. It was a “pro-
fessional society,” orderly yet “spiritual”; it was neither bureau-
cratic nor capitalist.

There seems little question that Parsons’ focus on the professions
was stimulated by his polemical effort to refute the depression-
intensified conception of modern society that had focused on its
capitalist character. “If asked what were the most distinctive
features [of Western civilization], relatively few social scientists
would mention the professions at all. Probably the majority would
unhesitatingly refer to the modem economic order, to ‘capitalism,’
‘free enterprise,’ the “business economy,’ or however else it is
denominated.” 24 For Parsons the focus on the professions was an
opportunity to diminish the significance then commonly attributed
to the “capitalistic” or “profit-making” aspect of modem society. 25

The emphasis in Parsons’ analysis of the professions is on their
similarity to business, on the elements common to both. Hitherto,
says Parsons, the common view has had it that the businessman
egoistically pursued his own self-interest while the professional
altruistically served others. Not so, he says. Business and the pro-
fessions do not pursue essentially different motives; the difference
between them, says Parsons, is “one of the different situations in
which the same commonly human motives operate . . . the acquisi-
tiveness of modem business is institutional rather than motiva-
tional.” 2 ' 1 Both businessmen and professionals seek “success” and
recognition of their success, even though the manner in which
success is concretely defined and pursued may differ in each case.
Thus professionals are not “altruistic” in the conventional sense,
while businessmen are not "egoistic”; both are simply conforming
to the standards deemed appropriate in their special areas of
activity. Moreover, businessmen and professionals are also alike in
their rationality, seeking the most efficient rather than traditional
ways of carrying on work; the authority of both is also character-
ized by their functional specificity, each being an authority only
in his own delimited areas; and both are universalistic, governing

156 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

their decisions by certain general and impersonal rules. Parsons’
emphasis, then, is on the characteristics common to the professions
and business, thus diminishing the significance attributed to the
self-interested pursuit of private gain. Parsons thereby envisions
businessmen as professionals. To the charge that the professions
have become commercialized, he counters by saying it is rather
commerce that has become professionalized. Assimilated to the
professions, business becomes credited with the moral responsibility
traditionally imputed to the professions for collective welfare and
thus is legitimated.

Seen as a profession, business comes to be defined as the moral
exercise of competence on behalf of the public interest in “pro-
ductivity.” The shift from Positivism to Parsonsianism, then, entails
a shift from science to professionalism as the source of elite legiti-
mation; the rational and empirical components of science are not
eliminated but are, rather, fused with a moral component, pro-
fessionalization. There were thus at least two important ways in
which Parsons sought to repair the modem split between power and
morality and to mend the Positivistic rift between the spiritual and
temporal orders; first, by a refocusing that moved the locus of
legitimation from science to the professions and, second, as I
have earlier emphasized in discussing Parsons’ “voluntarism,” by
a stress on the autonomy and causal potency of moral values in
determining social outcomes.

At the same time. Parsons also insisted that even the pre-
professional captains of industry were not to be understood as
having been primarily motivated by expedient or self-interested
considerations, for they were always under the heavy influence of
essentially moral values, particularly, of the Protestant Ethic or its
later, more secularized versions. In short, businessmen were seen
as motivated neither as American Populists had viewed them, by
greed and venality, nor as the Marxists had, by the structural
constraints of the capitalist system; businessmen and business
were seen as motivated by moral orientations that were becoming
increasingly institutionalized through professionalization. Such a
defense of the legitimacy of business, one might add, was more
likely to be persuasive to those whose personal reality derived
from experience with the older, better-educated, New England
business elites, than to those acquainted with the ‘hog-butchers”
of the Midwest.

Another evident difference between Positivism and Parsonsian-
ism is that the former was emphatically evolutionary in outlook,
while the latter is nonevolutionary or only marginally evolutionary.
That Parsons has lately produced an essay on “evolutionary uni-
versals” does no more than suggest that this is of some subsidiary

An Historical Model of Structural Development 157

concern to him. But evolutionism was crucial and not peripheral
to the Positivists. This difference seems to be related to the fact
that, unlike the Positivists, the middle class of Parsons’ society was
not threatened by an old elite which was identified with and drew
attention to the past, and thus did not need to look forward to a
future in which it would be rid of that incubus. The forces threaten-
ing the modem middle class are themselves very future-oriented
and look forward to a radically different society. Parsonsian Func-
tionalism, therefore, is grounded in a class experience that has
no stimulus to focus upon the past and little desire that its future
be radically different. Its impulses are fundamentally conservative:
they want more, but more of the same. It is thus not seriously
evolutionary but, rather, synchronic in its primary emphasis; its
concern is with social order, that is, integration. This is particularly
reflected in Parsons’ later post-World-War-II phase, where he moves
from his earlier stress on Weber’s interests to those of Durkheim’s.
Speaking of an article by Kenneth Boulding, Parsons remarks that:
“I, for one . . . would endorse what he [Boulding] refers to as a
‘strong temptation’ to identify sociology with concern about the
integrative system.” 27

THE BEGINNING OF A NEW PERIOD: EMERGING TRENDS

MARXISM AND ACADEMIC SOCIOLOGY: SCHISM AND
GROWING POLYCENTRISM

Seen from a world perspective, the schism between Academic
Sociology and Marxism remains one of the central features of the
historical structure of Western Sociology even into the present, the
fourth period, which is now ending. Following the Bolshevik Revo-
lution, the subsequent world development of Marxism has been
preponderantly influenced by the national sponsorship it received
from the Soviet Union. Following the institutionalization of
Academic Sociology at the University of Chicago in the 1920’s, and
most especially after its American center of gravity moved to the
Eastern Seaboard, the world development of Academic Sociology
has been preponderantly influenced by the United States. The in-
tellectual schism between Marxism and Academic Sociology was
not confined to their different sources of support within any country
but was paralleled on the level of an international polarity.

The split between Marxism and Academic Sociology has long

X58 Sociology: Contradictions and Infrastructure

induced each to avoid or to excoriate the other in intramural dis-
cussions. Yet while there was little open dialogue, there was a
limited or subterranean intercourse between them; e.g., Malinowski,
Merton, and Bukharin. One might say that in the United States
Marxism was part of the suppressed “underculture” of Academic
Sociology, particularly for those who matured during the 1930’s.
Correspondingly, Academic Sociology had a similar position vis-a-
vis Marxism in the Soviet Union.

In the latter part of the fourth period, especially following
World War II and the demise of Stalinism, the public dialogue
between the two traditions grew more open. “Concrete sociology”
emerged as an academic discipline in the Soviet Union, while in
the United States Marxism increasingly influenced the critique
of Parsonsianism — there was the beginning of a more “dialectical”
sociology. Both these wings of Western Sociology began to attend
the same international conferences of sociologists.

The schism between Marxism and Academic Sociology still re-
mained, however, a major global split during the Parsonsian period.
In both the Soviet Union and the United States sociology was used
as an instrument of state policy, both with respect to domestic
problems and as an instrument for international leverage, influ-
ence, and prestige. The Soviet Union had long employed Marxism
in this manner; the United States has done this increasingly since
the growth of its Welfare State following World War II, and it also
has used the social sciences to check the spread of political and
intellectual movements friendly toward Marxism and communism.
It has sent social scientists to Viet Nam; it has sought to study
revolutionary movements in Latin America; it has sponsored the
formation of social science organizations in Europe, such as the
Italian Social Science Research Council; and it has influenced such
international organizations as the OECD.

In consequence of this new American expansionism, the split
between Marxism and Academic Sociology has become complicated
by the emergence of a somewhat autonomous “Third Force”; that
is, by self-conscious effort among some European sociologists to
move toward a Pan-European sociology characterized by a rejection
of compulsive anti-Marxism and the various American intellectual
paradigms. Academic sociologists and Marxists in Europe have
manifested an increasing readiness to exchange views: a few
random examples are the summer school at Korcula, the Neiu Left
Review, Lucien Goldmann, Tom Bums.

By the 1960’s the polarized structure of Western Sociology had
thus become overlaid with, though not superseded by, a polycen-
tricist structure. Polycentrism within Marxism itself was spurred
by the drives toward autonomy of East Europeans, by Maoism and

An Historical Model of Structural Development *59

Castroism, as well as by a more scholarly neo-Marxism. Poly-
centrism was also manifested within Academic Sociology in gen-
eral and American sociology in particular, on both the institutional
and the theoretical levels. On the one side, powerful new centers
of study and training sprang up in the United States to challenge
the traditional precedence of Chicago and Harvard Universities.
On the other, George Homans, Ervin g Goffman, and Harold
Garfinkel formulated theoretical or methodological positions that
contrasted sharply and competed with the dominant Parsonsian
formulations.

So the new structural characteristic of American Academic
Sociology in the late 1960’s is the declining centrality of Parsonsian-
ism. We appear to be slowly entering an interregnum, in which
the system erected by Parsons — since World War II the dominant
theoretical synthesis — is undergoing a quiet eclipse. I shall, in a
later chapter, elaborate on why I think this is happening and what
it is bringing about. Here, however, I will simply outline the argu-
ment briefly and focus primarily on its structural implications.

pahsonsianism: impending entropy

Parsons’ system is undergoing a kind of entropy and is taking a
declining place in the professional attention of academic sociolo-
gists; in consequence, there is no longer a single, organizing, in-
tellectual center for the sociological community. Parsons’ system
was often a paradigm that gave coherence to the sociological com-
munity as much by the controversy it elicited as by the converts
it won. Today, however, it is used less as a system than as an
encyclopedia: parts of it are used here and there when sociologists
remember that it discusses a problem on which they happen to be
working; pieces of it are ingested in various areas of specialized
work. This is happening, however, not because its opponents
crushed it; indeed, in some respects it was never well enough
organized to be dealt a crushing blow. It has been not so much
exploded as picked apart and now is slowly expiring under the
growing apathy of its audience. Parsons’ own students grow less
distinguishable from those of other schools. In the course of in-
fluencing American sociology, Parsons’ own system loses its own
intellectual distinctiveness and its boundaries become less distinct.

If this leaves a vacuum at the center, we may, however, suspect
that it will not long be empty. For, in a way, Academic Sociology
is a science of repeatedly new beginnings; which is to say, it has
a strange tendency towards amnesia. In my own lifetime I have
known three sociologists who have said or publicly announced that

160 Sociolog)': Contradictions and Infrastructure

with them, or at least with their students, sociolog)' was at last
going to begin. However much one may deplore this lack of per-
spective, one can admire the dedication implicit in such an in-
genuous view.

To call Academic Sociology a science of new beginnings is to
suggest that it had best be wary of its faddish proclivities. At the
same time, however, it is to call attention to certain of its strengths:
its relative openness to intellectual innovations and its readiness to
deficit-finance them. To call Academic Sociology a science of new
beginnings is to take note of both its sometimes genuine openness
to intellectual novelty and its amnesia about its own heritage.

Among the sources of the impending entropy of Parsons’ system,
I shall only and briefly note two factors here: (i ) the development
of a distinct culture of the young, and (2) the very rapid growth
of the Welfare State following World War II. A new structure of
sentiments is emerging among important sectors of the younger
generation, in particular among those who are students and thus
very close to the academic establishments within which Academic
Sociology was developed and is taught. This new structure of
sentiments may be summarily characterized as consisting of those
elements expressed in the New Left, on the one hand, and in
Psychedelic Culture, on the other. Both of these are, as I will later
elaborate, deeply dissonant with the sentiments and assumptions
embedded in the Parsonsian synthesis. It is not likely that the
devotees of Psychedelic Culture will find Parsonsianism congenial;
indeed, the mind boggles at the thought of a Parsonsian hippie.
Parsonsianism will be felt to be irrelevant by the young adherents
of the New Left no less than by the exponents of Psychedelic
Culture. But this does not inevitably preclude a “Left Parsonsian-
ism,” or a “Neo-Parsonsianism” — in short, a Parsonsianism “stood
upon its feet” — any more than the conventional Hegelianism of
the early nineteenth century precluded a Left Hegelianism or a
Neo-Hegelianism. One cannot preclude the possibility of a radical
(as distinct from a Welfare State) Parsonsianism, even if one
cannot really believe it.

The relationship of Parsonsianism to the Welfare State is a more
complex problem. Modern sociology emerged most fully when the
middle class was free of the threat from the past or where it never
regarded it as a threat. It is apparent that sociology becomes most
fully institutionalized under the sponsorship of a powerful middle
class that has freed itself of the hegemony of older elites. Still, if
an industrial society were totally secure, if it had no social problems
that needed to be understood and managed, it would merely appre-
ciate but would not liberally endow a sociology. In almost all of
Western Europe, therefore, the emergence of the Welfare State and

162 Sociology: Contradictions arid Infrastructure

Sociology as the N + i science is peculiarly well-suited to the re-
quirements of the Welfare State, which is itself the N + i State,
serving as a kind of “holding corporation” for the diverse social
problems that recurrendy spin off from the normal "operation of the
society’s master institutions.

While the second phase of Parsonsianism is -more fully con-
sonant with a Welfare State, there are, as I suggested earlier, other
ways in which it is dissonant with it: most specifically, in its con-
ception of the equilibrating process as largely spontaneous in
character and as self-perpetuating. Not starting from a situation in
which conformity had broken down, Parsonsian analysis never
considered the mechanisms that may be mobilized deliberately, by
the state and other institutions, to prime the social process when
it has failed. The infrastructure of Parsonsianism remains pre-
Keynesian, insofar as it conceives of the relations among institu-
tions, or actors on the tacit model of a spontaneously equilibrated
laissez-faire economy rather than of a state-managed welfare
economy. It still remains deeply committed to the importance of
the role of moral values as sources of social solidarity and sees
these, in liberal perspective, as elements that should not be instru-
mentally manipulated by the state. Moreover, the Parsonsian model
resonates only one conception of the Welfare State, as a gyroscopic
engine of social order, but has littie relationship with that concep-
tion which views the Welfare State as an agency of justice and
equality.

• Even the second phase of Parsonsianism, then, does not con-
stitute a social theory that fully corresponds with a mature Welfare
State. It has become increasingly refracted toward the requirements
of the Welfare State, but it remains only a half-bom sociology of
the Welfare State; on some of its deeper levels it continues to
correspond with the requisites of a “free market” society. Parsonsian
theory is thus partly out of phase with a mature Welfare State, and
it is considerably out of phase with emerging Psychedelic Culture.
It is becoming, at least partially, irrelevant to the administrative
needs at the society’s management level, while, at the same time,
it does not congenially resonate the new structure of sentiments
emerging among potential recruits in younger groups. No longer
instrumentally or expressively appropriate to the time, it withers
as an intellectual paradigm, while theories advanced, say, by
Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, or George Homans provide a
more recent, significantly different reflection of the period.

An Historical Model of Structural Development

163

NOTES

1. Henri de Saint-Simon, Social Organization, the Science of Man and
Other Writings, F. Markham, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 9.

2. Ibid., pp. 26-77.

3. George Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (New
York: Macmillan, 1901), III, 79, 85.

4. Quoted in F. B. Artz, Reaction and Revolution, 1814-1832 (New York:
Harper and Bros., 1934), p. 49 -

5. See Madame de Stael on Politics, Literature and National Character,
Monroe Berger, ed. and trans. (New York: Doubleday, 1964). This includes a
translation of her work on Germany and has an excellent introduction.

6. Werner Sombart, Der Bourgeois (Munich: 1913), p. 263.

7. Karl Marx, Capital, Eden and Cedar Paul, trans. (New York: Dutton,
1930), II, 670.

8 . Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Saint-Simon, Social Organization, the Science of Man and Other
Writings, p. 4.

11. Perry Anderson, New Left Review (July-August 1968), p. 12.

12. Ibid., p. 12.

13. Ibid., p. 14-15.

14. J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1966), p. 226.

15. Quoted in ibid., p. 86.

16. B. Malinowski, “Ethnology and Society,” Economica, II, 208-219.

17. Burrow, Evolution and Society, p. 199.

18. Quoted in Anderson, New Left Review, p. 48.

19. Irving Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory
(N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968).

20. See Barbara S. Heyl, ‘The Harvard ‘Pareto Circle,’ ” Journal of the
History of Behavioral Sciences, IV, No. 41 (October 1968), 316-334.

21. Personal letter, quoted in ibid., p. 317.

22. George Homans review of J. Freeman’s An American Testament, in
Saturday Review of Literature, XV (October 31, 1936), 6.

23. T. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied (Glencoe,

111 .: The Free Press, 1949), P- 185.

24. Ibid., p. r86.

25. Ibid., p. 185.

26. Ibid., p. 187.

27. “My own inclination,” Parsons adds, “is to refer above all to Durkheim
(The Division of Labor in Society, especially) as the fountainhead of the
primary fruitful trend." (et al., I, No. 2 [Winter 1967], 6.)

PART II

The World of
Talcott Parsons

CHAPTER

The Early Parsons

We have been looking at the world through the wrong end of the
telescope, so that the resultant miniaturization might provide a
more comprehensive view both of the forest as a whole and of our
own place in it. Having situated ourselves historically, the time has
come to turn the telescope the other way around and seek a detailed
view of one part of the forest, our part. The preceding outline, pro-
tracted as it might seem, was intended only as background for a
close examination of the present period in sociology; it was merely
a preface. What follows is a critique of the present. The focus will
be primarily on contemporary Academic Sociology, indeed, on only
a segment of this. In consequence, I shall have all too little to say
in what follows about what is fully one-half of Western Sociology,
that is, Marxism. When I do discuss it, space will allow me to do
so only from a certain limited perspective, namely, its relationship,
first, to Academic Sociology in the West and, subsequently, to "con-
crete sociology” in the Soviet Union. The focus, then, will be on a
limited part of the contemporary state of Academic Sociology.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PARSONS

In my view, this means that we must now give concentrated atten-
tion to the theoretical work of Talcott Parsons. Some of Parsons’
critics will object to the attention he receives here. Disagreeing

167

i68

The World of Talcott Parsons

with his work, they want to ignore it; they would prefer to center
attention on those styles of sociology they prefer and believe more
intellectually viable or more socially "relevant.” But if it is the
present we wish to understand, then it is above all with Talcott
Parsons that we must be concerned.

Intellectually viable or not and socially “relevant” or not, it is
Parsons who, more than any other contemporary social theorist,
has influenced and captured the attention of academic sociologists,
and not only in the United States but throughout the world. It is
Parsons who has provided the focus of theoretical discussion for
three decades now, for those opposing him no less than for his
adherents.

Parsons’ influence has exerted itself not only through his own
prolific writings but also through his students, particularly Robert
Merton, Kingsley Davis, Robin Williams, Wilbert Moore, as well as
more recent students. They have been important because of their
intellectual work, as well as their dominant roles as officers of the
American Sociological Association and as editors of its journals.
Moreover, the work of Parsons and his students is widely known
and translated throughout the world of Academic Sociology; it is
read in London, Cologne, Bologna, Paris, Moscow, Jerusalem,
Tokyo, and Buenos Aires. More than any other modem academic
sociologist of any nationality, Parsons is a world figure.

In the United States, where I believe Parsons’ influence has
reached its apogee, his work retains a considerable audience, and
its standpoint still commands considerable respect. Thus, in the
1964 survey that Timothy Sprehe and I conducted among American
sociologists, and to which some 3,400 replied, we asked these men
to express their views on the following statement: “Functional
analysis and theory still retain great value for contemporary soci-
ology." Some eighty percent of the responding sociologists ex-
pressed agreement with it in varying degrees of intensity. We must
thus center our discussion of the present state of Academic Soci-
ology on Talcott Parsons’ theory, if for no other reason than the
sheer influence it has had throughout the world.

Yet it is not only the influence that justifies our close attention
but also the intrinsic significance of Parsons’ theory as theory. For,
there is no other work by an academic sociologist today that is as
relevant to the entire galaxy of important theoretical issues. To say
that Parsons is intellectually relevant is not, of course, to say that
he is right. Yet even where he is wrong, as I believe he is in funda-
mental respects, and even where he neglects certain problems, he
constrains us to confront them. If he himself does not directly deal
with every important theoretical problem, he brings us to its

The Early Parsons 169

threshold. There is no other academic theorist today — certainly
not Homans and not Goffman — who has half the world-influence
or the ramifying theoretical relevance of Talcott Parsons. Though
beginning to lose his dominance now, he was and still remains the
intellectual anchor of academic sociological theory in the modem
world.

Despite Parsons’ great significance for technical theory-work,
there remains the paradox that his work seems to be detached from
the world around it. Of the various social theories Americans have
formulated, that of Talcott Parsons appears to be the most uncon-
cerned with the problems of its day. Cast on its high level of ab-
straction, it does not manifestly center on American society as such
or even on industrial society more broadly. Indeed, for long
stretches in its presentation it is devoid of almost any kind of data.
It employs a terminology that obviously does not coincide with that
of everyday usage. If ever a social theory seemed to grow only from
purely technical considerations internal to social theory’, as if bom
of an immaculate conception, it is the work of Talcott Parsons.

Yet, as I have shown, this is merely appearance. The reality of
the situation, while by no means simple, is quite different. What is
usually forgotten, or at least never remarked upon, is that this
theory actually emerged in the United States during the Great De-
pression of the late xg3o’s. The historical juxtaposition of Parsons’
detached, technically engrossed theory and this time of turbulent
travail seems so sharply incongruous as to lend almost a -prima
facie plausibility to the assumption that the theory emerged inde-
pendently of societal pressures. Such an appearance of social ir-
relevance, however, is totally deceptive. We must not mistake de-
tachment for irrelevance.

UNIVERSITY STRUCTURE AND
THEORETICAL DETACHMENT

In the preceding chapter I began to explore this seeming disparity
between Parsons’ self-involved theorizing and the public crisis of
the 1930’s primarily in terms of the larger societal and international
context. In what follows I want to elaborate on this analysis of the
social origins of certain characteristics of Parsons’ theory. I will
begin here by focusing on the local institutional setting within

170 The World of Talcott Parsons

which it developed — specifically, the university setting — and then
in Chapter 6 return to the macroscopic influences on the theory, as
viewed from an historical perspective.

In some part. Parsons’ theory must be understood as the product
of the social organization characteristic of the intellectual life of
this period and, in particular, of the central role of the university
in that social organization. The theory was, more specifically, the
product of a relatively insulated university system, whose own
members were not as sensitizingly exposed as were the intellectuals
operating independently of it, to the economic crisis of the 1930’s.
There was, then, a split between those intellectuals who were
diffused through urban life and thus relatively vulnerable to the
economic hazards and career insecurities of the period, and those
academicians who lived a relatively insulated life because their in-
tellectual standards and career interests were rather greatly pro-
tected by the corporate structure of the university.

Unattached urban intellectuals had nothing like the university
traditions and organizational arrangements that protected the con-
tinuity of the academic scholars’ technical interests. They also had
nothing like the time-tested, community-enclosed solidarities that
guarded the economic and career interests of those in established
universities. Academicians, therefore, could continue to lead a com-
paratively corporate and traditional existence.

Several other specific social conditions that generated distance
between American academicians and the crisis of the 1930’s also
deserve mention. For one, the structure of university financing,
particularly in private universities, helped create a feeling of dis-
tance from social disruption, for it had the form of independent
capital endowments that would continue to provide economic
support. This, of course, implies a close tie between the class link-
ages of a university and its capacity to insulate itself from eco-
nomic crises. This is so for at least two reasons: first, because the
size of its independent capital endowment will be related to the
extent to which its alumni and students come from, or move into,
upper-class strata; second, because its operating costs are more
securely provided when derived from tuition fees of students who
can easily afford them. In short, the upper-class, private university
can better maintain its corporate cohesion during an economic
crisis; it will be less disunited by the differential economic security
of its academicians on different levels of tenure and seniority.

A second social condition generally conducive to the relative
insulation of American academicians from economic crises is to be
found in certain ecological arrangements. Many American univer-
sities are situated in small “university towns” in which the likeli-
hood of continuous arid involuted social interaction among acad-

The Early Parsons 171

emicians — and of corresponding distance from “others” — is
heightened, first, by their sheer physical propinquity to one another
and, second, by the endemic town-gown tensions that commonly
permeate such places. The existence of a common town “foe” often
enhances the social solidarity of academicians. In university towns
professional and personal interaction overlap to reinforce a sense
of corporate identity among academicians.

In general, then, one might expect that the corporate and mutual
protection of academicians, with a corresponding relative tendency
toward insulation from economic strains, would be greater in well-
endowed than in poorer, private universities. One might also expect
some difference in the isolation from societal strains to be mani-
fested by universities in university towns in contrast to those situ-
ated directly within great cities, for in the latter there is more
intercourse between academicians and other intellectuals, less pro-
pinquity among academicians, and, correspondingly, less corporate
cohesion among the academicians themselves.

These considerations hear upon the ability of a social science
faculty protected by a corporate university structure to define and
pursue problems in terms of a relatively autonomous technical tra-
dition, rather than in terms more responsive to publicly salient
concerns. They do not, however, directly clarify the reason and the
manner in which these technically-engrossed concerns will be ac-
cepted by the students. Several factors generally relevant to this
I shall here briefly mention and later expand upon: the prestige
of the faculty and of the university; the career opportunities that
the faculty can make available to the students; the extent to which
the students themselves value such career opportunities and the
degree to which they have and/or prefer alternatives to them. In
appropriate combination, these three factors may serve as a power-
ful social control by a social science faculty over its students and
thus facilitate its imposition of purely technical interests, despite
the students’ possible resistance to them and their greater openness
to problems of “social relevance.”

During the Great Depression, of course, job opportunities of all
sorts were scarce. The implications of this for the faculty's control
over the students largely depended upon the extent to which the
specific faculty could provide jobs for them. The faculty that could
not help the students had less control. The more a faculty could do,
however, especially in this time of general unemployment, the more
valuable the positions and prospects it could make available, the
more control it exerted. Furthermore, the more prestigious the
faculty and university, the more readily it could help its students
start their own careers, and hence the more rather than less success
in implanting its technical standards in students during a period

17 2 The World of Talcott Parsons

of economic crisis. Conversely, in a time of general prosperity, or
when the academic labor market is highly favorable to sellers, a
social science faculty would have less influence in this respect.

One other element of special importance to Academic Sociology’s
social isolation, and its corresponding focus on technical concerns
during the 1930’s, is worth mentioning. This is the fact that this
crisis was defined nationally as an economic failure and therefore
required an economic solution which, in turn, required economists.
Sociology, therefore, played hardly any role at all, and sociologists
were rarely called upon to contribute to national policy. At that
time, few national policy-makers had any clear conception of the
kinds of skills that sociologists commanded and of the uses to
which they might be put in the ongoing crisis. It was, therefore, not
only the corporate and class character of the university, the ecology
of university towns, and the state of the academic market that were
related to the emergence of Parsons’ detached, technically-involved
sociology; there was also the fact that there was then no large-
scale government market for sociology. There were few who would
tempt the “young thing” from a life of virtue. Like the lady who had
never been asked, sociologists could remain “pure.”

PARSONS AT HARVARD

These generalities, however, need to be applied to the special case
of Harvard University, for this was the specific institutional in-
cubator from which Parsons’ work emerged. We need briefly to take
cognizance of the distinctive institutional character of Harvard, its
special history, traditions, and ecological situation. Unlike Chicago
or Columbia Universities, which are centered directly in metropoli-
tan complexes and which are therefore more closely linked to the
life of their cities, Harvard, of course, is in the university town of
Cambridge. It lies at the periphery of Boston, from which it is
separated both geographically and symbolically by the Charles
River. While Cambridge is adjacent to Boston it is, nonetheless,
somewhat psychologically and ecologically enclaved. This enhances
Harvard’s isolation from metropolitan influence and better enables
it to reduce, though not eliminate, stimuli that might otherwise be
academically distracting.

Harvard’s capacity to maintain control over its own immediate
environment is also enhanced by its national eminence and pres-

The Early Parsons ^

tige. These enable it to strike a better bargain with local influences
and to remain relatively less vulnerable to town pressures than do
those less prestigious universities also situated in university towns.
During the Great Depression, moreover, academicians — particu-
larly those who were established and had tenure— did not suffer as
acutely as did other sectors of the population, whose styles of life
were often abruptly devastated. Indeed, tenured faculty were some-
times relatively advantaged. Senior professors with modest savings
accounts might, in fact, make a killing on plummeting real estate
values, and some were able to buy homes that they could not have
previously afforded. The setting of an upper-class university in a
university town, then, provided a relatively sheltering environment,
to some extent filtering out the crisis in the larger society and per-
mitting a somewhat greater detachment toward it.

In addition, Harvard also has what Robin Williams once aptly
termed an “Olympus Complex.” It has a rich awareness of its own
special, traditions and unique history’ which, in fact, begin before
the Congress of the United States. It has a confident sense of its
own intellectual excellence, from which it may look down without
fluctuating response on every episode in the social upheaval.

There are various ways in which the sheer novelty and the am-
bitious scope of Parsons’ enterprise were deeply dependent upon
the aura of Harvard. In accounting for Parsons’ novelty, it is im-
portant to remember the newness of Harvard’s Department of
Sociology in the early 1930’s. Indeed, the Department itself was
founded directly after the crash of 1929; P. A. Sorokin arrived to
head it in the summer of 1930, and the Department was officially
launched in September of 1931. While intellectual novelty is nom-
inally prized in all scholarly communities, in long-established de-
partments it is often restricted by recruiting practices that prefer
men acceptable to the governing professors and is limited by the
traditions they have developed. Lacking such limiting traditions
and still needing to establish its reputation in the larger intellectual
community, a new department may be relatively open to intellectual
innovation.

Again, the sheer ambitiousness of any intellectual effort will find
congenial support in Harvard’s “Olympus Complex” and in the high
expectations that it directs towards its faculty. Yet it is not simply
that Harvard expects its professors to be outstanding and that,
therefore, they strive to be, nor only that it is able to recruit out-
standing men with high ambitions. There is something more, of
considerable relevance to theorizing, particularly to theorizing
which is original in character and ambitious in scope. Theorizing
that is novel and ambitious is a risk-taking enterprise that cannot
be successfully pursued by those with diminished selves. It requires

1 74 The World of Talcott Parsons

not only ambition but an appreciable degree of self-confidence to
believe that one can produce theory comparable to that created by
the great minds that have come before. It requires, in short, a
measure of “theoretical conceit.” There are many personal sources
for such theoretical conceit, but there are institutional and social
sources for it as well; to have been selected as a faculty member at
a great university is, I believe, one of these. Appointment to its
staff is itself easily taken to be validation of unusual individual
promise, if not of greatness; the self thus powerfully validated may
dare where others only dream. It may be partially for this reason —
that is, because Harvard is an institutional incubator of “theoretical
conceit” — that so many of the men who have produced important
social theory in the present period have done it at Harvard.

Well-endowed, recruiting most of its undergraduates from an
elite who had relatively litde difficulty in paying the tuition, sur-
rounded and permeated by an aura of money and Family, having
regular intercourse with men of power and influence. Harvard is a
part of the American Establishment and a training and recruiting
ground for its elite. It is a relatively protected milieu, better able
than most to maintain the continuity of technical academic tradi-
tions, more effectively impose them on local academic interests,
more successfully resist the politicalization of graduate students of
sociology, and more easily control the press and mute the clamor
of current social tensions.

Let me stress, however, that it would be totally erroneous to
assume that these young men or their faculty were unaware of or
insensitive to the current economic crisis, or that it did not im-
pinge upon their careers in personal ways. There were many among
the faculty who closely followed the course of the developing New
Deal and the growing world crisis, and who indeed addressed them-
selves to the problems generated by the politics of social reform —
among them C. Zimmerman, J. Ford, N. Timasheff (who gave a
comparative course on Fascism, Nazism, and Communism) and
E. Hartshorne (who was particularly interested in Nazism). More-
over, some of the students came from poor or modest backgrounds,
from urban slums or small Southern farms; and many were aided
by government funds supplied by the National Youth Administra-
tion and the Works Project Administration, much of which were
administered through Zimmerman.

At the same time, however, the central figure was P. A. Sorokin,
the Department’s first Professor of Sociology, a man of established
international reputation even before his arrival at Harvard, and
whose reputation doubtless attracted many who came as graduate
students. It is certain that Sorokin exerted considerable influence

The Early Parsons

even upon those who found themselves increasingly drawn to the
theory being developed by the young Parsons, and that Sorokin
did much to center students’ attention upon technically complex
theory and, indeed, to define it as intellectually pivotal. My central
point, then, is not that the Depression failed to penetrate Harvard’s
Sociology Department but to explain how, despite the manifest at-
traction of current political and economic problems, a detached
and technical, self-engrossed theory was, nonetheless, able to de-
velop momentum.

The very expectations with which some of the graduate students
came to Harvard rendered them vulnerable to the detached ob-
jectivity that the university sought to inculcate. If some could never
expect to be true “Harvard men,” since they had done their under-
graduate work elsewhere, they could, nonetheless, expect to carry
away with them some of the special, advantaged aura of Harvard.
A Harvard degree does not merely imply special educational and
intellectual opportunities, if it implies that at all, but it certainly
means advantaged social and career opportunities. Even some of
the poorest young men who then came to study sociology at
Harvard were careful to take tennis rackets with them. To those of
modest origins the sheer fact of being at Harvard meant that they
had already come up in the world. Being at Harvard also implied
future social and career opportunities not likely to be totally unim-
portant even to the most intellectually dedicated among them. Un-
like the College of the City of New York (CCNY), for example,
Harvard still had rewards and promises that it could use, even
without vulgar brandishing, to control and induce restraint among
its young men. If there were academic posts to be had, Harvard
men had a better chance than most of getting them.

The graduate students who then gathered at Harvard were in-
telligent and socially-sensitive young men, often of plain if not
humble origins. The structure of their sentiments was influenced
by the tense disparity between the reality of their personal success
and the society’s failure. What was happening to them was very
different from what was happening to their social world. The
society’s malaise could not be viewed as a superficial aberration,
but it was still a society within which they had excellent prospects.
They were thus inclined neither to accept the society as it was nor
to rebel against it, they could instead develop a posture of detach-
ment. The ideal aloofness of Parsons’ theory made it possible for
those who accepted it to look beyond the suffering that the social
crisis was creating and to foster a sense of protective remoteness
from the society that was engendering it. It insulated them from
feeling that they must at once do something to alleviate the suffer-

176 The World of Talcott Parsons

ing or else be allied with the forces that were creating it. They need
feel neither responsible for what was happening nor guilty that they
did not seek to remedy it: they could, in short, be “objective.”

Yet their sense of the new depth of the American crisis made
them aware that the conventional diagnoses would no longer
suffice. They saw that what was then happening in the United
States was not an isolated event but something that was happening
to their social world as a whole. They sensed that a new and deeper
intellectual approach, with which they themselves associated,
would in time be needed. They felt, in sum, a structure of senti-
ments that was receptive to a new theory in which the society as a
whole could be seen at some remove.

Parsons gave his students the hope that something like this was
in the offing at Harvard; something that went far deeper than the
focus on isolated social problems that had previously prevailed in
American sociology; something whose sheer complexity could be
felt to be commensurate with the profundity of the crisis they were
witnessing; but something which, at the same time, would allow for
as well as further their own still buoyant personal aspirations.
Parsons’ young students could thus respond to the social crisis with
the feeling that the most valuable social contribution they could
make would be by sticking to their own last and developing a new
sociology (and themselves as sociologists) so that, in time, they
could provide the scientific help society required. The new theory
was not yet ready, while the old ones were manifestly inadequate.
Confident in their own growing intellectual skills and hopeful about
their own personal prospects, they could wait.

This was also a time, of course, when many young intellectuals
throughout the United States were developing an interest in theo-
retical or ideological systems and, in particular, when some were
being drawn to Marxism. Many of Parsons’ students found in their
teacher’s work a theory equally complex, with implications for art,
politics, and religion, no less than for economic institutions. Like
Marxism, it aimed at understanding society as a total system in
terms of the interrelation of its institutions. Parsons’ was a world
view that promised to compete with Marxism on all analytical
levels. For all its technical involution, then, Parsons’ theory en-
abled its young adherents to establish an ideological identity of
their own, which gave them distance not only from the society-in-
crisis but also from its most salient critics. Now they did not need
to be either low-brow adherents of the traditional map of the Ameri-
can social order or iconoclastic adherents of the most salient
counter-map: they need be neither Philistines nor revolutionaries.

An understanding of the full cultural significance of Parsons’
work must see it as in some part an American response to

The Early Parsons 177

Marxism. It was an American alternative to Marxism, which
through both its intellectual adventuresomeness and its seriousness
attracted and held the interest of many young intellectuals who
were under pressure to respond to Marxism. It gave them a per-
spective on the crisis of their society that enabled them to be
detached from the society without being opposed to it or allied with
its opponents.

In contrast to the system that Parsons was creating at Harvard,
Marxism was something that students read about in the library
and that was then deadened by Stalinism and not developing. Some
of Parsons' students had long since read the key Marxist works and
were growing increasingly aware of Marxism’s intellectual difficul-
ties from the lectures that N. Timasheff and P. A. Sorokin were at
that time giving at Harvard.

Unlike both Marxism and Sorokin’s work, however. Parsons’
theory then did not present a seemingly completed intellectual
system. It required and allowed serious theoretical development. It
did not confine ambitious young men to the “dirty work” of dog-
matic exegetics or limited research applications. It was, rather, an
intellectual system whose manifest incompleteness was experi-
enced as an opportunity-making “openness”; students could buy
into it at relatively little cost. It is, in part, precisely because of its
“shortcomings” that the ideas of a younger instructor are often
more attractive than those of an older and better established pro-
fessor. For the older man is in a position to make more costly
demands on students, and his more polished product seems to leave
little work for younger minds. The young man requires allies to
protect his emerging theory in its formative period; the older
theorist with the finished system has a doctrine to which he seeks
conformity: he seeks disciples rather than students. And besides,
lacking an impressive bibliography to further their careers, young
faculty members are constrained to listen to and seek alliances with
students.

Parsons’ theory emerged in a period when the previous American
tradition of the study of isolated social problems was manifestly in-
competent to deal with social strains that obviously ramified
through all institutions and social strata, and when the only other
established large-scale social theory well known to many intellec-
tuals was a Marxism that was being stultified by Stalinism. It was
also a time when many other European theoretical traditions —
which had never recovered from the devastations of World War I —
seemed to have spent their creative impulse and were floundering.
For all his profound immersal in European social theory, the fact
that Parsons was an American was not inconsequential for the
synthesis he wrought. He could treat French, Italian, and German

178 The World of Talcott Parsons

theorists with little evidence of nationalistic parochialism or of a
world-weary pessimism.

Parsons endowed his students with a social theory that had
ramifying philosophical roots and promising empirical possibilities.
It was a theoretical system which, if not because of its rigor then
at least because of its complexity, was something to be reckoned
with. It could thus enable its adherents to hold their own in the
competitive give-and-take of an academic world that was then still
quite suspicious, if not contemptuous, of sociology’s intellectual
credentials.

Curiously, then, the crystallization of what was to become the
new, technical American sociology, and which until World War II
resisted immediate social engineering, progressed by capturing
conventional loyalties that had been dislodged by a deep social
crisis. The full irony of this development lies in the fact that the
earlier phase of American sociology, with its more openly practical
bent, had been the expression of a more stable society. It had been
made by men with greater conviction about their society’s inherent
soundness and rightness. The emerging Parsonsian phase, with its
greater detachment, was made by young men involved in far
greater social upheavals and who were much less confident of their
society’s basic stability.

THE DEBATE ABOUT CAPITALISM

A genetic view of Parsons’ work must begin by noting his early and
intensive studies of the theories of Werner Sombart and Max
Weber, as these had focused on the emergence of modem cap-
italism. At the very beginning of his work. Parsons manifested tire
most intense interest in the nature of capitalism, its antecedents,
character, and prospects, as well as in theories about capitalism.
Parsons’ doctoral dissertation at Heidelberg — to which he went
after studying under Malinowski at the London School of Eco-
nomics — was addressed to these problems and, as might be ex-
pected, his earliest publications dealt with them. Some time after
these, his next publications include a translation of Max Weber’s
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

It deserves notice, even in these brief remarks, that Weber’s
Protcstmit Ethic was fully compatible with the Durklieimian tend-

The Early Parsons 179

ency to transform evolutionism into comparative studies. Weber’s
central focus was on the origins of modem society. It was an his-
torical analysis in a comparative framework, not an evolutionary
analysis. Its concern was with the conditions that had led to the
emergence of modem society, and not with a whole series of types
of societies, in which the modem was seen as but the latest. In the
main, Weber emphasized that the spirit of capitalism had been
shaped by the Protestant ethic, and he stressed that the hallmark of
modem society and its economy is not its venal, profit-pursuing but,
rather, its rational mode of production and its rational, essentially
bureaucratic mode of social organization. This emphasis made an
enduring impression on Parsons’ conception of the nature of mod-
em capitalism.

Whatever else may be said about this early work of Parsons, it
scarcely can be said to have been of only academic relevance.
While the relevance of much of his later work for problems of con-
temporary significance is not always easily discernible, here, in his
earliest work, Parsons was manifestly interested in larger social
issues. In the world of the twentieth century, following the success-
ful Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the defeated revolutions in
Germany and Hungary, as well as the downhill flow of revolution-
ary movements into die Orient, it was quite clear that capitalist
societies were being confronted by a vigorous, world-wide opponent
that was Marxist in avowal and derivation. This opponent clearly
intended to exploit capitalism’s vulnerabilities and to hasten its
demise, which (it asserted) was in any event “inevitable”: it in-
tended to be the historical heir of capitalism.

One common element in the work of both Weber and Sombart
had been their polemical yet respectful posture toward the Marxist
interpretation of capitalism. In 1928 and 1937 Parsons noted that
Marxian theory had formed the focus for the discussion of cap-
italism in Germany. 1 Indeed, opposition to Marxism was a common
quality not only of Sombart and Weber but also of the other social
theorists — namely, Pareto and Durkheim — on whom Parsons fo-
cused in his 1937 synthesis. The Structure of Social Action. A
critique of Marxism was not simply a peripheral or incidental by-
product of the work of all these men but was, commonly, one of
their animating impulses. Sombart, Durkheim, and Pareto had all
produced full-scale studies of socialism that were deeply polemical.
In Weber’s case, his Protestant Ethic was directed against the
Marxian hypothesis that Protestantism was the result of the emer-
gence of capitalism; more generally, Weber opposed the Marxist
conception that values and ideas are “supers tructural” elements
that depend, in the last analysis, upon prior changes in the eco-

i8o The World of Talcott Parsons

nomic foundation; Weber, rather, sought to demonstrate that the
development of modem European capitalism was itself contingent
upon the Protestant ethic.

Parsons distinguished two periods in Weber’s theoretical out-
look: an earlier phase, prior to his nervous breakdown, which had
“a rather definite materialistic bias,” and a later phase character-
ized by “a new anti-Marxian interpretation” of modem capitalism. 2
It is often said, as Parsons does, that Weber was not denying the
importance of material factors but merely attempting to correct
Marx’s overemphasis on them. 3 This is specious. It is akin to saying
that the enemies of Darwinian evolutionism were not denying that
man arose out of lower animal species but were merely correcting
Darwin’s overemphasis on this! What Weber did was to treat “ma-
terial” factors simply as one in a set of interacting factors; whereas,
despite his emphatic system focus, Marx had affirmed the special
importance and ultimate ■primacy of material factors. Thus Weber
was not merely reducing the “weighting” to be assigned to material
factors but was polemicizing against the distinctive structure of
Marx’s explanatory model.

Parsons found himself in a strange situation when beginning to
deal with Sombart and Weber. While agreeing with the intent of
their anti-Marxist critique, he could not accept their conclusions,
since both were deeply critical of capitalism as well. Indeed, Par-
sons felt that Sombart and Weber were even more deeply pessimis-
tic about industrialism than Marx himself. While Parsons con-
curred in their anti-Marxism, he was much perturbed by their
pessimism and their anticapitalism. In short, one of the important
things that stimulated Parsons’ own creative effort was the conflict
between his own structure of sentiments and those of Sombart and
Weber.

Both Sombart and Weber had emphasized that capitalism was
fostered by certain ideological factors, the capitalist Geist or Spirit
in Sombart’s case and the Protestant ethic in Weber’s. Both had
stressed that capitalism entailed a distinctive type of morality that
transcended individual venality. Sombart, like Weber, had stressed
the rational element in the capitalist spirit, particularly in its later'
phases, although he had .also attended to its competitiveness and
acquisitiveness. This stress on the rationality of capitalism tended
to diminish the Marxist emphasis on the historical uniqueness of
socialism; the latter was now viewed simply as a development con-
tinuous with capitalism, moving in the same rational direction.
Rationality was seen as expressed organizationally in the bureau-
cratic character of the capitalist enterprise, which was thus, in this
respect, viewed as not basically different from the socialist form.
Variations in property institutions were, in short, taken to be of

The Early Parsons 181

secondary significance. In regarding both socialism and capitalism
as fundamentally bureaucratic, Weber thus minimized the dis-
tinctiveness of socialism; in effect, he argued that if the proletariat
had “nothing to lose but their chains” by revolting against cap-
italism, they also had little to gain. At the same time, however,
this also diminished the uniqueness of capitalism, and Parsons ob-
jected to this.

Unlike Marx, who had viewed capitalism as developing through
a series of economic strains and class conflicts, Sombart saw it in
a more Hegelian way, as an unfolding of the capitalist Geist. In
Sombart’s emphasis on the Geist, as well as in Weber’s emphasis
on the role of the Protestant ethic. Parsons was to see a theoretical
convergence of considerable significance. This was a convergence
that attributed a measure of autonomy to “value elements” or moral
values, and which, in his Structure of Social Action, Parsons later
claimed to be the distinctive focus of social theory in the late nine-
teenth century. Parsons subsequently developed Sombart’s and
Weber’s critiques of Marx into a systematic discussion of the gen-
eralized importance of moral values, thereby confronting Marxism
not simply on a specific issue of historical interpretation, but on
the broadest possible theoretical level. In short. Parsons’ first major
work. The Structure of Social Action, stems in important part from
his earlier interest in these anti-Marxist theories of capitalism. It
takes as its point of departure an effort to generalize and extend
the anti-Marxist polemics of Sombart and Weber.

As suggested, however, there were important ways in which
Parsons in 1928 felt that these anti-Marxist critics had not gone
far enough, had accepted too many of Marx’s assumptions, and had
remained rooted in a theoretical tradition more like than different
from Marxism. In particular, Parsons took exception to two aspects
of their position: the deterministic metaphysics and the pessimistic
structure of sentiment that suffused their work.

In their determinism both Sombart and Weber viewed capitalism
as Marx had, says Parsons: That is, as forcing “the individual
businessman into the race for profit, not because he is venal by
nature, nor because it represents the highest values in life for him,
but because his enterprise must earn profit or go under.”-* The fault
of capitalist exploitation, thus construed, rests not with the individ-
ual capitalist but with the social system that constrains him to
exploit or be ruined. Sombart saw capitalism as a powerful mecha-
nism that, during its mature phase, subjugated all to a rationalistic,
calculating spirit that w r as located not even in the entrepreneur
himself but rather in the impersonal business organization. Som-
bart thus saw capitalism, complains Parsons, as a kind of “monster”
possessed of its own purposes and going its own way, independently

lSz The World of Talcott Parsons

of the will — if not of the activity — of individual human beings.
Consequently, says Parsons, Sombart’s “view results in fully as rigid
a determinism as that of Marx. All the individual can do is to
‘express’ this spirit in his thoughts and actions. He is powerless to
change it .’’ 5 Parsons therefore accuses Sombart of overemphasizing
the rigidity of modem society and of succumbing to fatalism and
pessimism. Parsons explicitly rejects this pessimism in favor of a
gradualistic meliorism: “There seems to be little reason,” he says,
"to believe that it is not possible on the basis which we now have,
to build by a continuous process something more nearly approach-
ing an ideal society .” 0

TOWARD THE PERFECTION OF CAPITALISM

This formulation succinctly exposes both the difference and the
continuity between Parsons and Durkheim. Each sought change
within the framework of his society’s existent master institutions
and through a “continuous process.” There is, however, a visible
difference between the early Parsons’ cautious Protestant perfec-
tionism and Durkheim’s more Catholic organicism. This may be
noted by contrasting Parsons’ remarks above with Durkheim’s
parallel formulation in The Rules of Sociological Method: it is,
Durkheim says, “no longer a matter of pursuing desperately an
objective that retreats as one advances, but of working with steady
perseverance to maintain the normal state, of re-establishing it if it
is threatened, and of rediscovering its conditions if they have
changed .” 7 In effect, Parsons’ Functionalism is a more optimistic
one than Durkheim’s. Although Parsons fully shares Durkheim’s
concern for social order and equilibrium, he in principle, envisions
a somewhat more dynamic equilibrium, more susceptible to in-
fluence by men’s active efforts in pursuit of their moral ideals.

To Parsons, progress is not based on a deterministic evolution-
ism but is, rather, seen to be animated by men’s commitment to
the activistic fulfillment of their transcendental values. The con-
temporary condition of capitalist society, indicates Parsons, does
provide a basis for its gradual perfection. It is inherently sound
even if presently disrupted: things are not so bad. Indeed, capital-
ism’s sheer technological accomplishments are seen as a source of
hope. It is going too far, says Parsons, to deny as Sombart pretty

The Early Parsons 183

much does, all value to our civilization’s conquest of nature. Tech-
nological development and industrial society possess value; they do
not, as Durkheim claims, dangerously undermine the sources of
social stability by exacerbating men’s inherently insatiable appetites.

Parsons is as much exercised by Weber’s pessimism as by Som-
bart’s. In some ways similar to Sombart, Weber had felt that
modern society was being warped by the growth of lifeless bureau-
cratic routines that increasingly dominated the major institutional
areas. In Weber’s view, complains Parsons, capitalism presents a
dead and mechanized condition of society, in which no room is left
for truly creative or charismatic forces “because all human activity
is forced to follow the ‘system.’” While acknowledging the wide-
spread rationalization of modern life, Parsons challenges Weber’s
pessimism. Present-day bureaucracy, he says, need not continue
to dominate life, and there is the possibility that it may once again
be made to serve spiritual ends. Weber’s pessimism, says Parsons,
derives from his acceptance of the Marxian dualism between ma-
terial and spiritual forces, but there is no reason to believe that
these are the ultimate factors in social development.

Much of Parsons’ later theoretical work is shaped by these two
powerful impulses clearly manifest in his earliest work: ( 1 ) by his
effort to generalize the anti-Marxist critique, and, (2) at the same
time, by his effort to overcome the determinism, the pessimism,
and, indeed, the anticapitalism of these critics of Marxism.

Stated in other terms, Weber and Sombart — while disagreeing
with Marx about the historical conditions that had led to capitalism
and, in general, about the role of moral and ideological forces —
had, nonetheless, agreed with Marx that the central social problem
of modem society was alienation, a condition that they opposed, as
he did. In this respect the Germans had been of one mind. Since
Sombart and Weber, however, rejected socialism, they, unlike
Marx, saw no solution. Oddly enough, then, Parsons shares, in full
self-consciousness, some of Marx’s optimism, the difference being
that Parsons believed modem society could be gradually perfected
within the framework of capitalism: that is, “on the basis which
we now have.”

In his 1928-1929 articles on capitalism. Parsons was still pre-
pared to believe in a kind of chastened social evolution, "even
though it is not so plain as it has been thought, and even though
its ethical interpretation in terms of progress is unwarranted,” and
so long as it was neither “so radically discontinuous nor so radically
determined” as that of Sombart. 8 In short, Parsons was ready to
accept social evolution if it left a place for moral striving and in-
dividual choice. Indeed, he was then even prepared to entertain

184 The World of Talcott Parsons

the thought that capitalism itself might one day be superseded, so
long as there was room left for continuity: “in the transition from
capitalism to a different social system surely many elements of the
present would be built into the new order.” 9

Parsons, then, believed that capitalism as it was, was still not
perfected; he had been exposed to the German critique of capitalism
and accepted certain aspects of it, particularly its Romantic rejec-
tion of “materialism.” He maintained that, “it does seem that the
apostles of progress and freedom have been somewhat overhasty
in their optimism, and it is by no means certain that the conquest
of nature alone is sufficient cause to boast the glory of our civ-
ilization . . . our tendency to glorify it is evidence of a lack of a
proper sense of cultural balance.” 10 Here Parsons speaks as a
tranquilized Rousseau, prudently acknowledging that the progress
of culture and manners may not have kept abreast of the progress
of science and technology. He thus looks forward to a gradual
evolution that will create a more balanced society in which this
cultural lag will be remedied by the blossoming of spiritual culture.

In 1965 Parsons indicates that his patience has been vindicated.
He declares the spiritual imbalance to have been redressed and
proclaims that “capitalism” is on the verge of being transcended:
“democratic government, the welfare state, trade unionism . . .
education, science, and even humanistic culture play such im-
portant roles that calling [the United States] capitalistic’ in any-
thing like the classical Marxian sense seems increasingly forced.” 11

Parsons, after all, had studied in the great seats of European
culture; he had walked where great thinkers had walked, and he
had even glimpsed the Blue Flower. The son of the Congregation -
alist minister had no vulgarian impulse to surrender to things as
they were in the late ig2o’s. He had wanted to perfect the spiritual
aspect of American culture, to make it a fitting capstone of its
technological triumph; he had wanted to mend the split between
the spiritual and the economic, and he viewed capitalism itself as
imbued with a deeply moral element. Indeed, he regarded it as
possessing a noteworthy uniqueness, and complained that Weber
had lost sight of its organic individuality. 12 Strongly influenced by
the Germans in the beginning, accepting their critique of Marxism
but not their pessimism about capitalism. Parsons viewed capital-
ism as in need of a cultural fine-tuning (much as had the early
Positivists) but as healthy in its essentials. He saw capitalism from
a syncretic standpoint that combined European intellectual per-
spectives with American sentiments. European theory had, on the
one hand, given him some perspective on capitalism, while, on the
other — and even before the Great Depression — it had vaccinated
him against the most radical of the criticisms of capitalism. When

The Early Parsons 185

the crisis came he would not be panicked into a shoddy defensive-
ness and trivial polemics, but would be able to maintain a steady
course in a thoroughgoing defense of his basic vision.

THE DRIFT TOWARD THEORETICAL VOLUNTARISM

Sombart, Weber, Parsons in The Structure of Social Action, and the
young Marx of the philosophical manuscripts, all agree that a
situation in which men are molded by autonomous social forces,
and in which their aims and efforts are controlled and overridden,
is undesirable. Weber and Sombart tended to see this as unavoid-
able in modem industrial civilization; Marx saw it as inevitable
under capitalism but avoidable under communism; Parsons sees it
as avoidable even under capitalism. Indeed, it is a central point of
Parsons’ “voluntarism” that men’s efforts always make a difference
in what happens.

Viewing men as goal-seeking creatures whose own efforts can
change their lives. Parsons’ vision converges with that of Marx, and
particularly that of the young Marx of alienation. In The Structure
of Social Action, however. Parsons is unaware of this partial con-
vergence with Marx. In some part, this is due to Parsons’ un-
familiarity with Marx’s own writings, and particularly with the
earlier, pre-1847 work in which Marx had focused most explicitly
on the problem of alienation. Indeed, in 1937 Parsons did not cite
a single original Marxian source. Of course, the Marx-Engels Insti-
tute had published only the first volume of (what was expected to
be) the complete works of Marx and Engels in 1927, and it was
only in this and later volumes that the definitive texts of Marx’s
earlier writings were first made available. Some passages in the
German Ideology were made available in English by Sidney Hook,
but not until 1936; the full manuscript itself was published in
English in 1938. Similarly, H. P. Adams’ study of Marx’s earlier
writings appeared in 1940. But Parsons’ The Structure of Social
Action had already been published in 1937. But, despite the sub-
sequent publication of Marxian texts, Parsons never has cited a
single one of Marx’s own writings, not even in his 1965 paper on
Marx.

It is not only, however, because Parsons was unaware of Marx’s
earlier work that in 1937 he failed to see the convergence between
Marx’s concept of alienation and his own antideterministic volun-

i86 The World of Talcott Parsons

tarism. There was another difficulty that impeded Parsons' clear
view of this convergence, for, to see the development of Marxism
in this way would have complicated, if not contradicted, Parsons'
thesis about the development of nineteenth-century social theory.
In the Structure of Social Action Parsons had held that, in the late
nineteenth century, social theory commonly manifested a con-
vergence toward, a voluntaristic view that saw men’s actions as
shaped by their own volitions, desires, decisions, choices, and striv-
ings, as a major element in the interacting system of social forces.

Without Procrustean effort, it is quite easy to see the difference
between the earlier and later Marx in precisely these terms — but, in
the opposite direction. The young Marx had given greater em-
phasis than the older one to these voluntaristic elements and had,
indeed, seen man’s species character as entailing such end-directed,
goal-shaped strivings. In a class society, however, they resulted in
unanticipated consequences at variance with man’s true intentions,
stressed Marx; indeed, it was this that manifested the alienated
condition that Marx sought to abolish. The earlier Marx had thus
emphasized a conception of man as making his own history in the
pursuit of his goals, while it was the later Marx who had stressed,
and decried, the manner in which the capitalist system subjected
man to its own blind laws. Under capitalism, man made history,
but only in an alienated way; actors were alienated from the con-
sequences of their own actions; they neither knew them as theirs
nor controlled them. Marx’s own work, then, manifests a drift not
toward hut rather away from a voluntaristic social theory.

Parsons might argue, however, that the development of Marx’s
work does not essentially fall within the period (the Classical
period, as I have called it) with which he was concerned in the
Structure of Social Action. In other words, he might hold that the
voluntaristic drift in social theory was simply a "law” of the third
period, while Marx’s work largely falls in the second. The question
would then arise as to why this should be so; that is, why should
the drift manifest itself in the later but not the earlier period?

Here we have to consider Parsons’ general explanation of the
voluntaristic drift in social theory: He argues that this drift can-
not be explained in Hegelian, in Marxian, or in sociology-of-
knowledge terms; that is, it was not due to the immanent unfolding
of a set of initial theories or to the social conditions of the historical
period. Nor, for that matter, he says, was it explainable in em-
piricist or Positivistic terms, as due only to the accumulation of new
facts.™

Parsons instead accounts for the voluntaristic drift as due to the
interaction of the accumulating facts with theory; theory led to the
formulation of problems and shaped research interests that gen-

The Early Parsons 187

erated facts which, in turn, constrained theory toward voluntarism.

But since the theorists that had presumably ended in a common
place had begun in different ways, it is difficult to understand
how their substantive theories could have contributed to the sub-
sequent, voluntaristic outcome. Parsons is thus unwillingly forced
back either to a Hegelian or Marxian account, or to a Positivistic
explanation that stresses the importance of the facts. Parsons tries
to save his account of the voluntaristic drift by opting for the latter;
that is, by giving special importance to the role of facts. In a foot-
note, Parsons declares that one of the reasons why the voluntaristic
drift emerged was its “empirical validity.” 14 He acknowledges that
“other factors” also conduced to the voluntaristic development with-
out specifying them, but adds, in emphasis, that “had it not been
for the fact that its authors observed correctly, and reasoned
cogently about their observations, the [voluntaristic] theory . . .
would not have developed.” 15

In the end Parsons seems to be holding that the voluntaristic
drift in social theory occurred because of the empirical reliability
of the observations and the logical correctness of the inferences
made from them. In effect, he resolves the conundrum of how
different theoretical starting points could have had the same
terminus by minimizing, if not sacrificing, the role of substantive
theory. Parsons’ explanation of the drift toward voluntaristic social
theory, then, largely comes down to a matter of the cumulation of
reliable facts subjected to valid reasoning — in short, to a view that
stresses the autonomy of social science from social forces, a view
surprisingly close to the Positivistic and utilitarian standpoint
against which he had polemicized.

It would therefore follow that the reason Marx’s work became
less, rather than more, voluntaristic over time was that it had not
been based on reliable facts and/or had not subjected them to valid
reasoning. Such an inference is, at least, compatible with Parsons’
long-standing disposition to emphasize the pre-scientific and ideo-
logical, if not religious character of Marxism. Parsons wishes, on
the one hand, to underscore the scientific validity of a voluntaristic
model of social theory and, on the other, to undermine the con-
temporary “scientific” standing of Marxism. Since it is the very
convergence among theorists that, for Parsons, suggests that “the
concepts of the voluntaristic theory of action must be sound theo-
retical concepts,” then the very different line of development of
Marx’s own work presumably implies that it is unsound.

The difficulties and tendentiousness of Parsons’ position become
even plainer if the following considerations are added. Even if we
confine Marx to the second period, we cannot do so, for Marxism.
It continued to develop and change into the third period, the period

i88 The World of Talcott Parsons

on which Parsons’ voluntaristic thesis is focused. Specifically, it
was in the third period that V. I. Lenin emphasized the leadership
initiatives of the revolutionary party and mounted his attack
against the theory of political sponteneity. In addressing himself to
the problem of What Is to Be Done?, Lenin gave new importance
precisely to the voluntaristic component in Marxism. In short,
Lenin’s political and social theory gave every indication of having
moved appreciably toward the very voluntarism that Parsons’ at-
tributes to the academic social theorists of the Classical period.
Parsons, however, takes no note of this. And if he had, how could
he have accounted for it, and remained consistent, except as still
another indication of the influence of correct observation and
cogent reasoning? One of the important reasons for Parsons’ ne-
glecting of both Marx and Lenin, then, seems to have been that in
the former instance Parsons would have faced a negative case at
variance with his generalization, while in the latter he would have
had an embarrassing confirmation of it; it would have required
him to endorse the scientific character of Lenin’s social theory,
which would have been at variance with his inclination to expel
Marxism from “true,” scientific sociology.

There is one other peculiarity in Parsons’ development of the
thesis of a voluntaristic drift in social theory that should be briefly
mentioned. In his 1928-1929 discussion of Sombart’s and Weber’s
treatment of capitalism, Parsons emphasized that their image of
capitalism had unduly stressed nonvoluntaristic components: that
is, it had manifested a deterministic character; had entailed a view
of capitalism as being bureaucratic and rigidified; had embodied a
unilinear evolutionism; had held that the development of capital-
ism spelled the destruction of the charismatic elements in social
life and the loss of spiritual aims. Parsons accused Weber of saying
that the religious values that had originally given capitalism per-
sonal meaning had been superseded by an “automatic, mechanistic
system” in which material goods had gained an inexorable hold
over men’s lives. 1 " Prior to the Depression, then. Parsons had
emphasized not the voluntaristic, but the antivoluntaristic com-
ponent of Weber and other third-period theorists of capitalism. It
is only after the Depression, in the Structure of Social Action, that
Parsons sharply recasts his vision of them to emphasize their con-
tribution to the development of a voluntaristic social theory.

The theorists whom Parsons had summoned in evidence of his
thesis about voluntaristic development had not changed from 1928
to 1937; it was Parsons who had changed. What happened, in
short, was that with the Depression and the growing salience of
Marxism in the United States, there was greater pressure to de-
velop and fortify the intellectual alternatives to Marxism, and to

The Early Parsons 189

expel Marxism from consideration as a sociology much like any
other. And, indeed, a similar thing had previously happened to the
classical academic theorists themselves, -and it had been that very
thing which led some of them, too, toward a heightened volun-
tarism. In brief, one may accept Parsons’ thesis about the increased
drift toward a voluntaristic social theory among the classical soci-
ologists and attribute it, in some appreciable part, to their own
common effort to combat the materialistic determinism of Marx-
ism. But, coming out of the tradition of German idealism, it was the
materialistic — and not the deterministic — aspect that they most
consistently opposed. Their principal impulse was to resist the de-
valuation of the “spiritual'’; a deterministic idealism , a version of
the Hegelian geist, was actually attractive because it underscored
the potency of the spiritual. For its part, Lenin’s new voluntarism
needs no special, or different, explanation, except that he was
looking for a theoretical standpoint that would skirt the determi-
nistic component of Marxism and leave room for revolutionary in-
itiative within the basic Marxist framework. Lenin’s voluntarism
was, therefore, inserted at the level of a politics, of political or-
ganization and strategy, rather than at the level of generalized
social theory.

ALIENATION AND VOLUNTARISM

While Parsons is unaware of it, there was a convergence between
his voluntarism and that of at least the young Marx, for both
agree that man is and should be a goal-oriented, striving creature
whose history reflects his own efforts. Parsons’ polemic against
Marx is, though he is unaware of it, directed primarily against the
older M arx , whose work probed the limitations that historically
specific social conditions imposed upon men’s efforts, both analyz-
ing and denouncing the emergence of an autonomous social system
that could impose itself on men and override their efforts. But in
his quarrel with the pessimism and determinism of Sombart and
Weber, and in his one-sided emphasis on the determinism of the
older Marx and Engels, Parsons was in unwitting agreement with
the voung Marx.

Yet this convergence is a limited one. Parsons’ voluntarism and
Marx’s conception of alienation agree only in their view of man as
a striving, goal-seeking creature. Both had been shaped in this

xgo The World of Talcott Parsons

respect by German Romanticism. Parsons’ voluntarism, however,
stresses that man’s efforts count, not because they are realized
successfully but simply because things turn out differently than
they would have without them. Parsons does not view as unde-
sirable the difference between man’s intentions and the outcomes
of his action, but it is precisely this difference that was a central
problem to Marx.

Stressing that men themselves should make their social world,
Marx decried their being alienated from it, not controlling it, not
knowing it as a world of their own making. Marx wanted to know
the varying and specific historical conditions that led to such
alienation, so that it might be overcome; he wanted to reduce the
gap between what men intend and the outcomes of their action,
between the producer and his product. That men’s actions result in
outcomes at variance with their intentions was, for Marx, a funda-
mental social pathology.

Parsons, however, is content simply to suggest that sometimes
men achieve what they strive for, sometimes not, and that things
are in either event different because of men’s strivings. It is this
sheer difference that is important to Parsons because his volun-
tarism is primarily an expression of his antideterminism. The
values men pursue are not reducible to the social conditions that
influence and shape them, and do not — as Parsons is at pains to
insist — result in conditions that mirror men’s intentions. That
men’s values cannot be reduced to other social conditions implies
that they cannot be predicted from other social conditions; his
point is not, though, that one can predict how outcomes will con-
form with men’s intentions, but only that outcomes would differ,
in some unspecified way, if men’s intentions differed. Parsons
makes no systematic analysis of the diverse forces that shape
men’s efforts or of what they, in turn, account for.

In effect, then, voluntarism for Parsons serves as a randomizing
rather than a structuring mechanism, and is thus expressive of his
antideterministic intent . 17 Voluntarism and morality are the equiva-
lent of “free will”; they serve not simply to qualify other theo-
retical models by inserting another variable into the predictive
equation, but rather to undermine the entire possibility of any
kind of determinism, even that of a probablistic predictability.
Moral norms are tacitly the prime starting mechanisms, the
unmoved movers.

For Parsons the voluntaristic conception of action refers to
a process in which the concrete human plays an active, not merely
an adaptive, role; far from being automatic, the realization of
ultimate values is a matter of active energy, of will, of effort.
Parsons insists on a distinction as well as a connection between

The Early Parsons igi

“ultimate” moral values, on the one hand, and the specifically
voluntaristic component, the active, striving efforts of individuals,
on the other hand. ls Whether or not norms are realized, he holds,
“depends upon the effort of the individuals acting as well as upon
the conditions in which they act.” Morevover, Parsons specifically
indicates that it is this “active element of the relation of men to
norms [which is] the creative or voluntaristic side of it.” 19

Parsons further adds that, while a voluntaristic social theory
involves moral norms, it “does not in the least deny an important
role to conditional and other non-normative elements, but considers
them interdependent with the normative.”- 0 Voluntarism does not
hold that the mere existence and recognition of a moral norm
implies automatic conformity with it; and it certainly denies that
moral norms are merely manifestations of other forces but them-
selves lack in causal potency. Both such views, objects Parsons,
imply that action is an “automatic process.” (This would seem to
suggest that here Parsons is polemicizing against the use of
mechanical models for social analysis and is, in general, favorably
disposed to those more organismic models that stress the impor-
tance of emergent forces.) Rejecting both those views of moral
norms. Parsons instead holds that moral norms are only one
variable in a set of interdependent elements in social action, and
that their influence is achieved only by overcoming resistance
and obstacles to them. 21

It is clear that Parsons is attempting to treat the significance
of moral norms quite differently than had the Positivists who,
from Saint-Simon to Durkheim, had stressed their significance as
externals, constraining the individual. In 1937 Parsons instead
conceives the significance of moral norms as potent energizers
motivating lines of effort and striving, on the one hand, and as
bases for selecting and integrating courses of action, on the other.
In stressing voluntarism and in placing a concern with moral
norms in this context. Parsons is, in effect, expressing the con-
viction that no more than anything else do moral norms inevitably
preclude certain kinds of change. More generally. Parsons is
stressing the openness of social action and historical development.—

Parsons’ voluntarism thus contains a tremendous ambiguity
about moral norms. On the one hand. Parsons, like Durkheim,
tends to reduce or qualify the importance attributed to them, first,
by seeing them as only one in a set of interdependent variables
and, second, by stressing that they work their effects only through
an intervening variable, the will or effort. On the other hand, how-
ever, it is clear that moral elements do have a very special sig-
nificance for him. They are the only specific mechanism for ener-
gizing will that Parsons systematically considers; indeed, he makes

1Q2 The World of Talcott Parsons

a special point of stating that a voluntaristic theory “involves
elements of a normative character.” Parsons' voluntarism is an
effort to maintain a special place for moral norms, while at the
same time rejecting the deterministic framework in which they
had hitherto been cast: he is emphasizing the power of morality.

It is precisely because moral norms serve, in effect, as anti-
deterministic elements in Parsons’ social theory, as determinism-
reducing elements, that it is intrinsically difficult for Parsons
systematically to address himself to the question of where moral
norms themselves come from and on what they themselves depend.
For, once this is confronted it becomes possible, in principle, to
predict the non- normative conditions that give rise to norms;
voluntarism would tend to break down in the direction of what
Parsons calls a “utilitarian” social theory, in which moral forces
are treated as manifestations of other real forces. Parsons wants
to have his moral norms without paying the Positivist price of a
deterministic universe . 2 - 1

To the extent that men attained what they sought, the social
world would obviously be predictable and controllable; there would
be a measure of determinism in it. Parsons’ antideterminism, there-
fore, leads him to focus on and value the existence of the sheer
difference between what men seek and what they bring about; this
difference is not seen as "bad” and in need of a remedy, but as
“good,” being, in effect, an evidence of men’s freedom. For Parsons
it is men’s failure — their ignorance and their impotence — that
marks their freedom, and man's “alienation” is the price of his
freedom.

There is thus a tendency in Parsons’ theory to stress the pre-
sumed need for a sheer communality of moral norms, with only
the most formal limitation on what these norms might be, other
than that they must not be at variance with the requisites of social
system survival. His stress, then, is on the diversity of possible value
commitments that might be made, rather than on the things that
limit them. Since it is possible for men to w r ant and pursue widely
varying values, and since there is no systematic sociology of morals
that might specify the conditions under w'hich different moral be-
liefs might emerge, Parsons’ system tends toward an historical
indeterminism. There is thus a tendency for his voluntarism to
come down to the assumption that, with respect to social change,
many outcomes are possible. But not quite. For there is another
element in The Structure of Social Action that emphasizes the
u n anticipated consequences of purposive social action and, in
particular, its difficulties and dangers . 24

Parsons conceives of man as a creature whose striving influences
but does not limit history; he sees this striving as a blind one. Man

The Early Parsons 1 93

is seen as bound by nonrational moralities, confined and thwarted
by other forces, and repeatedly trapped by the unanticipated con-
sequences of purposive social action. To Parsons, men are free to
strive, but are not free to achieve what they strive for. Men make
a difference, but not the difference they intend. This, indeed, is
a picture of Marx’s alienated man. But what for Marx is an his-
torical pathology to be overcome is for Parsons the unavoidable
and eternal condition of man.

While stressing the importance of the ends and values that men
pursue, Parsons never asks whose ends and values these are. Are
they pursuing their own ends or those imposed upon them by
others? He never asks whether men are striving to achieve goals
that they themselves have rationally inspected and selected, or
whether theirs is the striving of tools, energetically seeking ends
that others have programmed them to pursue. And Parsons never
asks, under what social conditions can men select their own goals
and under what condition will they blindly seek goals set for them
by others? Parsons never sees that there is a profound difference
between the failure to achieve one’s own goals and the failure to
achieve goals that others have imposed upon us. He fails to see
that the ultimate alienation is not that we fail in what we seek,
but that we seek what is not ours. The ultimate alienation is that
we live our lives as tools and that we do not live for ourselves.

Parsons’ conception of men as “eager tools,” willingly pursuing
whatever goals have been “internalized” in them, largely derives
from the stress he places upon “socialization” as a value-imprinting
mechanism,- his stress upon socialization implicitly defines men as
value-transmitting and value-receiving creatures rather than as
value-creating creatures. Here, then, the very agency that is the
source of men’s humanness, socialization, is also the agency that
eternally makes man a tool to pursue the ends of others; man is
thus alienated in the very process of becoming human.

Parsons has, in effect, generalized alienation, transforming it
from an historical condition to the universal fate of men. It is here
that he makes his most general reply to Marx. To Parsons, man is
alienated not under capitalism alone but in any society; and this
very alienation is the condition of his humanity and freedom. Thus,
although Parsons begins by objecting to a view of men as automa-
tons, controlled by any social system or by mechanized bureauc-
racy, he ends by seeing them as necessarily subject to a nonrational
morality, bound by goals they do not choose but which are imposed
upon them by socialization, and whose pursuit has results that are
often at variance with what they seek. Instead of bending his social
science to the problem of how men might better control their social
world, better realize their own goals, and better reduce the unan-

194 The World of Talcott Parsons

ticipated consequences of their striving; instead of exploring the
social conditions that make it more rather than less possible for
men to know and achieve their own goals. Parsons simply focuses
on the universal limits within which all social action must take
place, on the indeterminism of social action and the sheer con-
tingency of historical development.

In releasing men from the bondage of determinism, Parsons
restricted the possibilities of predictability, control, and successful
achievement. He provides no basis on which men’s actions can
achieve their goals or realize their hopes. Voluntarism gives men
the freedom to make things “different” from what they might have
been, but neither the freedom nor the power to get what they want.
In extolling man’s creativity, energy, and will. Parsons reassures
men that they and their efforts make a “difference”; but if this does
not mean that they can more fully achieve their purposes, what
difference does this make? Men might as well be bound by history
and evolution. In extolling men’s creative initiative without giving
them hope of fulfillment, in extolling their striving despite its slim
success. Parsons, in effect, extols the striving of the blind, who
might indeed do better and be safer if they strived less.

Parsons’ voluntarism thus contains a contradiction, particularly
so when he extols men’s efforts and strivings but, at the same time,
warns against the unanticipated consequences of purposive social
action. For, the latter is, after all, often an expression of men’s
efforts to achieve certain moral values. Taken seriously, such a
warning might be conducive to apathy rather than effort. The
theory of the unanticipated consequence of purposive social action
thus neutralizes the theory of voluntaristic effort. Taken together,
the two in effect seem to say that men can have freedom but not
successful achievement, that they should strive but not hope for
too much. This was clearly an apt lesson in humility for respectable
men caught in the depression. Indeed, much of the clue to this
problem is in the history of the ig3o’s.

This period was characterized by intensive and concentrated
efforts at purposive social action, whose dominant form — as in the
New Deal — was one that conservatives did not relish. The kind of
purposive social action against which the emphasis on unantici-
pated social consequences warns is, implicitly, that undertaken on
behalf of only a limited set of moral values, liberal or radical
values. The point of the theory of unanticipated consequences is
not usually aimed, say, at the purposive action of governments at
war. In effect, then, the indeterminism of Parsons is essentially
a caveat about liberal or radical change and, indeed, all efforts at
social change that exert a strain on the status quo.

Parsons began by wanting to stress the importance of moral

The Early Parsons 195

values and effort against determinism and pessimism. In this, how-
ever, he necessarily left the door open to all kinds of values and
effort, including those that, from a conservative standpoint, are
disruptive of the status quo. He was therefore faced with the
resultant task of, on the one side, sanctioning morally motivated
effort but, on the other, finding a way to discourage certain kinds
of moral effort: system-disruptive efforts. Parsons closes the door
that his voluntarism had left open by warning of the unanticipated
consequences of purposive social action. Parsons* effort to make
men free thus operates within the limits of, and indeed conflicts
with, his concern about maintaining social order.

In its net impact, Parsons* simultaneous emphasis on volun-
tarism and on unanticipated consequences is a recommendation
that men should strive to realize their values but should not expect
too much. It is a theoretical mix that tacitly serves to sustain striv-
ing despite the experience of failure: striving should be chastened
by awareness of the possibility of failure; it should be a prudent
and limited striving, not a zealous and passionate striving. Such a
striving will suffice to keep men at their duty, will tone up the
existent social system, but will not rock boats.

TIIE LIBERALIZATION OF FUNCTIONALISM

Seen as a conservative manifesto of antideterminism and anti-
pessimism, Parsons’ earliest work should no longer appear so
utterly disconnected with the calamitous events in the surrounding
society. If one were to regard it as a Shavian piece of “Advice to
Intelligent Patriots in the Midst of Social Disaster,” it might be
thought of as a remonstrance not to despair, but to take heart, to
believe that they may yet work their way out of the impasse in
which they find themselves, to believe that their own energies and
effort do make some difference, and to believe that they should
not surrender to false theories that prophesy an end to their way
of life. For all its detachment, then, Parsons’ early work is very
much a response to the crisis of his time.

But it is not a response from the standpoint of those whose
deprivation was near destitution; it does not, in short, resonate to
the suffering of the bankrupt small farmer or the unemployed
worker. Indeed, it is only if we expect that a response to social
crisis must express sympathy with suffering that we will fail to

ig6 The World of Talcott Parsons

see Parsons’ work as a response. Parsons’ response, however, is
singularly insensitive to the sheer suffering of the desperately
afflicted. Nowhere is the word "poverty” mentioned in The Structure
of Social Action , although it is written in the midst of a national
experience with breadlines, unemployment, and hunger. Instead,
Parsons’ response is concerned to avoid institutional discontinuities
and to maintain traditional loyalties; that is, he is concerned with
discouraging radical social change. It is not so much the suffering
of individuals as the resultant threat to the established culture, to
which Parsons is responding. It is in this way a conservative
response to the social crisis.

Yet it also needs to be added that it is a very American form
of conservatism, which tempers loyalty to established institutions
with individualism. If its response to the vast crisis seems insuf-
ficient because it still stresses individual effort rather than collec-
tive solutions, and if it neglects the needs of individuals, nonetheless
it also retains a sensitivity to their potency. Conservative though it
was in comparison with the changes upon which the nation was
then irretrievably launched, it was, by comparison with Durkheim’s
social theory, a step toward liberalism. Unlike the latter, it does
not obliterate individuals in its concern for social order and soli-
darity; it does not see them as tools and embodiments of the
collective conscience and exoteric social currents; it does not exhort
them to be suspicious of industry and of man’s greedy insatiable
appetites, to bow dependently before society, to like the idea of
circumscribed tasks and limited horizons, to curtail ambitions, or
to be docile to authority. With the shift from Durkheim’s to Parsons’
Functionalism, the values embedded in Functional theory have
appreciably shifted.

The shift toward this more liberal Functionalism seems, in part,
attributable simply to its diffusion from French into American
culture, for the latter has always been more individualistically
liberal than France with its etatist traditions. In other words, the
value change in Parsons’ Functionalism is to be understood as due
to a shift in the national culture in which Sociological Function-
alism now found itself, rather than to a shift in its class sensitivi-
ties. Functionalism still resonated an essentially middle-class out-
look, but the American and French middle classes differed. From
this standpoint Parsons’ emerging Functionalism resonates tradi-
tional American middle-class conceptions and aspirations, which
were intrinsically more individualistic than those traditional to
the French.

Parsons’ early work, then, may be conceived not as free of any
response to the ongoing American social crisis nor as a value-free
response independent of class orientations but, rather, as express-

The Early Parsons 1 9 7

ing a middle-class conception of, and response to, the crisis. From
this standpoint the problem was not sheer suffering or deprivation
but rather the danger that these might promote efforts at disruptive
social change, radical institutional innovation, and thus might lead
to a loss of faith in the traditional middle-class value placed on
individual effort.

NOTES

1. Cf. T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1937 ). P- 495 -

2. I bid., p. 503. Also, see “‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature:
Sombart and Weber — Concluded,” Journal of Political Economy, XXXVII,
No. 1 (February 1929), 40. Here Parsons noted that Weber’s Protestant Ethic
“was intended to be a refutation of the Marxian thesis.”

3. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, p. 511.

4. Parsons, “ ‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature: Sombart and
Weber — Concluded,” p. 35.

5. Parsons, “ ‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature,” Journal of
Political Economy, XXXVI (December 1928), 660.

6 . Ibid.

7. Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. E. G. Catlin,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 75 -

8. Parsons, " ‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature,” p. 693.

9. Ibid.

jo. Ibid., p. 654.

11. T. Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modem Society (New York: Free
Press, 1967), p. 125.

12. I bid., pp. 48-49.

13. Parsons, Structure of Social Action, p. 725.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. 726.

16. Parsons, ‘‘‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature,” p. 43.

17. This may be noted clearly in Parsons’ definition of what “ends” are:
“An end, then, in the analytical sense must be defined as the difference
between the anticipated future state of affairs and that which it could have
been predicted would ensue from the initial situation without the agency of
the actor having intervened." ( The Structure of Social Action, p. 49.) The
actor, in short, introduces a nonpredictable element. This seems to be the
case, even though Parsons is at pains to emphasize that the striving, voli-
tional component is itself partly structured by moral values, for there is no
systematic analysis of the general conditions that shape moral values them-
selves and lead them to take one form rather than another. Moral values
pattern individual action and, when common to actors, are a vital condition
of social system stability; but they are not held to produce individual or
collective outcomes in accordance -with the intentions they foster. They make
a difference, but this is unspecified in character.

18. A voluntaristic social theory, such as Parsons espouses in The Structure
of Social Action, is, he says, one that “involves elements of a normative
character” (p. 81). By norms he means "states of affairs which are regarded
by individuals as putatively desirable and hence [they] strive to realize them."
Here it seems as if Parsons almost equates moral norms and men’s active
efforts to realize them, although in other places he distinguishes these.

19. Ibid., p. 82.

The World of Talcott Parsons

198

20. Ibid.

21. Thus, “the failure of the actual course of action to correspond exactly
with that prescribed by the norm is not proof that the latter is unimportant
but only that it is not alone important” (ibid., p. 251). The existence of this
resistance, he adds, as well as the overcoming of it, implies the importance
of another element, to wit, “effort.” The distinctive element in voluntarism,
then, is not moral norms as such; it is, rather, the human effort which they
may arouse or, for any other reason, activate.

22. What actually happens, he is saying, depends in part on what people
strive for and want to happen. What people want, he says, depends vitally
but not exclusively on the moral norms that people have; for, in principle,
any “agencies which stimulate this will” play a very important part in deter-
mining historical outcomes. While Parsons, in principle, does recognize that
various elements can energize will, the fact remains that the only one of
these to which he gives express attention is moral norms, thus indicating the
special significance he attributes to them.

23. But different levels are distinguishable here. Parsons wants to see
moral norms as controlling and restraining individuals (structuring and
patterning their wants) and also as stabilizing social systems — but not as
confining history. He wishes, on the other side, to stress that social order and
the integration of social action require common moral norms, since these are
held to pattern and limit the courses taken by individuals; but, on the other
side. Parsons also wishes to stress an antideterministic position -with respect
to historical change, and to prevent an evolutionary foreclosure of possible
lines of societal development.

24. This can be better seen if we note that Parsons advances his volun-
taristic model as an alternative to the “utilitarian” model, against which he
polemicizes. In the utilitarian model, as Parsons sees it, men deliberately
appraise their social situation and choose courses of conduct by appraising
which of them will best realize their goals. His utilitarian model premises
that men seek knowledge in order to change, or that in order to change they
first need knowledge. His voluntaristic model, however, argues that men's
behavior is not basically predicated on a rational survey of their situation or
on knowledge of it, but rather on commitments to certain ultimate, non-
rational values that the actor takes as given. In effect, then, the tendency of
Parsons’ voluntarism is to diminish the significance attributed to rationality
and knowledge as elements in social action. Parsons’ emphasis on nonrational
moral values, as opposed to the utilitarian emphasis on knowledge and in-
formation, focuses attention on those factors in social action and change that
are not amenable to planful control and deliberate use. And even knowledge
and science, like other social elements, are seen as having unanticipated
consequences. The entire role of social science itself, as a guide to social
change, is therefore radically if unwittingly undermined. For what is stressed
is that social solidarity or social “health" depends upon the vitality of this
nonrational element rather than on rational planning or change.

CHAPTER

Making the TV orld TVhole:
Parsons as a Systems Analyst

Undergirding the phantasmagorical conceptual superstructure that
Parsons has raised there is an unshakable metaphysical conviction:
that the world is one, and must be made safe in its oneness. Its
oneness, Parsons believes, is the world’s most vital character. Its
parts, therefore, take on meaning and significance only in relation
to this wholeness. Making conceptual distinctions is not an end in
itself for Parsons, but a way of providing ports of access to the
whole. In this thrust toward unitariness. Parsons’ system has a
living connection with the tradition of Sociological Positivism,
whose abiding impulse was to "organize” and to integrate the social
world, and, further back, with Platonism itself.

I want to begin to explore this aspect of Parsons’ metaphysics
from a curious standpoint, in terms of what is, as it were, the
shell of his work, the “mere” appearance that strikes one almost
immediately on picking it up — in short, its literary style. One of
the obvious but invariably neglected aspects of any social theory
is the fact that it has a form as well as a content. All social theory
thus far has had some literary form; w’hich is to say, it is written
in some style. Since form and content are fused, it may be possible
to discern part of what a theory means by examining not only what
it says but also how it says this . 1

It is commonly recognized that the sheer structure of Parsons’
work has two obvious and indubitable characteristics. First, it has
a powerful conceptualizing drive: it presents and strings together
concept after concept; it names concepts, defines concepts, sub-
divides concepts, exemplifies concepts, categorizes concepts. Sec-

199

200 The World of Taicott Parsons

ond, and I will deal first with this aspect of its literary structure,
it is more Delphically obscure, more Germanically opaque, more
confused and confusing by far, than that of any other sociologist
considered here or, indeed, of any whom I know. Mr. Parsons’ style
was from its beginning a byword for obscurity among American
sociologists. Unfortunately, however, there has been much more
snickering about Mr. Parsons’ tortured style than there has been
serious thought about what it might mean.

NOTES TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF
THEORETICAL OBSCURITY

The use of such an exceptionally obscure literary style by any
writer might token what could be conceived of as the wish for
"privatization” of his work or as an impairment of his interest in
communication. In brief, Mr. Parsons does not have a strong
impulse to be understood by others. In some part, this testifies to
Mr. Parsons’ conception of his role: he sees his task as a technical
and professional one, which admits no responsibilities to a larger
audience. Yet the fact is, it is not only a lay audience that finds
Parsons’ style forbidding, but also other sociologists. This, in turn,
would seem to imply that he has not been terribly concerned about
communicating effectively even with his peers, or even about being
understood by them.

We need to ask how Parsons has been able to get away with this
and to inquire into the social conditions that have permitted it to
happen. Most generally, it seems to imply a breakdown in the
system of social controls that normally shape a scholar’s work. In
particular, I would like to suggest that Parsons’ obscurity may be
related to his being protected by Harvard’s high social position.

Like any university, Harvard’s social position tends to have a
"halo effect” on the prestige of its faculty members. Commonly,
that is, the higher the national repute of a university, the higher
the prestige of those associated with it. Simply by reason of being
at Harvard a man gets a substantial measure of “unearned pres-
tige.” A university’s prestige, of course, affects the bargaining posi-
tion of its faculty. But “bargaining position” does not refer solely to
what a man can command in rank and salary in the national labor
market of his profession; it refers also to the treatment of his -work
in its intellectual market. The greater the prestige of the uni-

201

Parsons as a Systems Analyst

versity with which a scholar is associated, the greater the readiness
to credit his work and to tolerate departures from the profession’s
conventions, including its literary expectations. Stated otherwise,
the higher the prestige imputed to a scholar by his associates
nationally, whether because of his own contributions or because of
his university affiliation, the greater their readiness to grant him
“deviance credits,” which, in turn, allow him greater freedom
either for creativity or for sheer idiosyncrasy.

This may manifest itself in various ways. For example, when a
scholar is confronted with a very prestigious colleague’s work,
which he finds difficult to understand or to see importance in, he
is more likely to blame himself than when confronted with simi-
larly obscure work by a less prestigious colleague. Indeed, I can
think of at least one important sociologist, a man of outstanding
and enduring attainments, who was so traumatized by his diffi-
culty in understanding Parsons’ work that he assumed this signified
his own impending obsolescence. Faced with the obscure work of
prestigious colleagues, scholars are also likely to favor it with the
assumption that its manifest muddiness is indicative of a hidden
depth. The point is not that obscure work is necessarily fostered by
a prestigious university — George Homans’ work at Harvard clearly
scotches that — but, rather, that such an affiliation can enable a
man to escape the neglect that obscurity commonly invites.

A central social fact explaining the acceptance and spread of
Parsons' work, despite its considerable intellectual fuzziness and
obscure style, remains, in my view, that it was developed at and
associated with Harvard. For, in addition to the unearned prestige
with which this endowed Parsons’ publications, being at Harvard
also meant that Parsons had access to many first-rate students.
Since they were first-rate, and also because they acquired Harvard
degrees, these young men soon assumed important positions else-
where in the academic world, from which vantage points they
could, in turn, more readily win additional adherents to his theory.
It is my impression that, more than any other contemporary aca-
demic social theory, Parsons’ has made its way through such a
network of adherents who, of course, had a personal stake in
winning acceptance for it. The opacity of the master’s own words
was thus counterbalanced by the devotedness of his students, at
least for a certain period, and by the fact that they, unlike Parsons,
often could and did write well, and sometimes very well indeed.

Yet it must not be supposed that the obscurity of Parsons’ style
had only the effect of impeding the understanding and diffusion
of his ideas. For, the sheer difficulty in understanding Parsons can
be overcome, if at all, only by considerable effort, which constitutes
an appreciable personal investment in his work and engenders

202

The World of Talcott Parsons

what is, in effect, a vested interest in it. The scholar’s return on his
investment may come from discussing Parsons’ ideas publicly,
either critically or in a favorable spirit; either course probably
results in making them better known.

It is also noteworthy that a difficult style may serve to protect
intellectual creativity. The task of an intellectual innovator is two-
sided. He must detach himself from conventional approaches,
whether these are conventional to a larger lay public or to a nar-
rower group of specialists like himself; he must, this means, protect
himself from the press of conventional approaches, lest his own
originality be diluted. An innovator, however, must also find some
way of securing support for his early still undeveloped, and hence
particularly precarious efforts; he must make or win adherents,
establishing a new group that will shelter his innovation. Linguistic
and stylistic obscurity serves both functions.

Obscurity makes a work relatively costly. It is costly for those
bearing conventional views to penetrate its meanings, and they
will therefore often ignore it or give it short shrift. This, in turn,
relieves the innovator from the pain of adverse criticisms. His
work will at first often be ignored or only superficially criticized.
The innovator can feel, and justifiably, that his critics have not
studied it carefully or understood it deeply. He can thus dismiss
his critics painlessly and proceed on his own course.

To publish in a very difficult style is almost equivalent to not
publishing. In reading an extremely obscure work, those first drawn
to it are dealing with a not yet truly public object, but with some-
thing that is more nearly akin to a “cult object.” It is much like
reading an unpublished and privately circulated manuscript, which
has, in effect, the aura of a “secret teaching.” Because of its diffi-
culty the work must be given an “interpretation.” Its interpretation
and understanding are, in part, dependent upon a personal ac-
quaintance with the author, and knowledge of it often implies a
special relation to him.

The early initiates of such a theory may thus feel a lonely but
privileged distance from their larger intellectual communities. The
very difficulty of interpreting the new doctrine heightens inter-
communication among the first adherents, and this, along with its
new, membership-symbolizing vocabulary, draws them together
into an intellectual community. The new doctrine becomes firmly
imprinted in the members as they seek to clarify it for one another
and to explain or defend it from outsiders. The result, then, is
that the new doctrine is protected by becoming deeply internalized
in each adherent and by the developing social solidarity of the first-
generation “seed-group.” These, in turn, safeguard the intellectual

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 203

coherence of the new doctrine and reduce its tendency toward
entropy.

There are, however, contrary consequences of obscurity, which
ultimately do generate entropy-increasing forces. Because the work
is obscure, it allows various interpretations that may be appreciably
different from one another. This enhances its attractiveness to
competitive intellectuals, enabling each to distinguish himself from
the other adherents. In time, however, as each continuously de-
velops his own individuated interpretation by cross-breeding with
the increasingly differentiated developments of his peers, the co-
herence of the innovator’s original system is attenuated, it blends
into the larger intellectual environment, and it becomes increas-
ingly difficult to distinguish from the “background.”

There are, of course, various kinds as well as various sources of
intellectual obscurity. For example, there is a kind of obscurity
that is tradition-protected and, within learned disciplines, is con-
ceived of as a “technical” difficulty. The technically difficult is, in
short, obscure only to the uninitiated, and it is a socially sanctioned
obscurity, in the view of those initiated. There is also an idiosyn-
cratic obscurity that is not sanctioned by the traditions of any
intellectual community but is peculiar to an individual. Much of
Parsons’ obscurity is of this sort; it is quite distinguishable from
the obscurity, says, of Karl Marx’s Capital, which is obscure only
to those uninitiated in the technical idiom of nineteenth-century
political economy.

Again, there is a syntactical obscurity as distinct from one of
vocabulary. Vocabulary obscurities relate to difficulties in under-
standing the manner in which objects are defined and their
boundaries established, while syntactical obscurities bear upon
the manner in which defined objects are related to one another.
In Parsons, both obscurities are found frequently. They are so
common because so much of Parsons’ work entails the presentation
of proliferating neologisms and object definitions: this I have
previously referred to as his conceptualizing drive. His work is
taken up, in large part, with the more or less simultaneous presen-
tation of numerous conceptualized objects while he is trying to
establish their relations to one another.

At the core of Parsons’ obscurity, then, is the sheer multiplicity
of objects under examination and the attempted simultaneity
with which they, and their relations to one another, are presented.
By virtue of this “busy-ness,” few of them are intellectually in-
spected long and carefully, and few are illustrated with the kinds
of concrete examples that might enhance their intelligibility. Like
the juggler who has to keep many balls in the air, he may not touch
any one of them more than momentarily.

204 The World of Talcott Parsons

The sense that one gets in reading Parsons’ work is of a kind
of headlong rush that does not allow him time to edit what he has
written before publishing it. Parsons is telling us quite plainly that,
in his understanding of the theoretical enterprise, “neatness” does
not count, details that might clarify do not count, and, indeed, no
one of the parts touched upon at a given moment counts. What,
then, does count?

For Parsons what matters above all else is the whole , and his
ability to sustain contact with his glimpsed apprehension of the
whole. He is engaged in a race against the sensed ephemerality
of his vision of the whole; his need is to fix and bind it in its
wholeness. He must hurry on before it fades. One reason for this
is that the structures Parsons “sees” are lacking in social reality, in
the specific sense that they are not maintained by publicly shared,
cultural definitions and traditions; they are, rather, highly private
distinctions which, as such, have only a precarious reality. They
must be written down quickly, for it is largely through such literary
objectification that they may seem real. Intensely preoccupied with
the maintenance and inspection of his own precarious vision of
the social whole, much of Parsons’ theoretical work is an excep-
tionally privatized effort, little attentive to the anticipated reactions
of others and, hence, blind to the obscurity of his own com-
munication.

Parsons’ obscurity leads us, I believe, to the central concern of
his most basic metaphysics, which clearly devolves from an affirma-
tion of the importance of the whole and its priority to the parts. For,
it is his commitment to the whole and his inability to see the parts
as having reality except by their involvement in a whole, that lead
Parsons to push on and conceptually constitute the total system at
once without pausing to work through the clarifying details. There
is for Parsons a kind of urgency; he must forthwith constitute the
total anatomy of social systems and identify all their components
immediately, for without this conceptual constitution of the system
as a whole, the parts are uninterpretable:

The most essential condition of successful dynamic analysis is con-
tinual and systematic reference of every problem to the state of the
system as a whole ... A process or set of conditions either ‘contrib-
utes’ to the maintenance (or development) of the system or it is ‘dys-
functional’ in that it detracts from the integration and effectiveness of
the system. 2

Each part depends on and contributes to every other, and it is
lacking in stable signification apart from what it does for and
receives from every other; it thus has no being apart from its
involvements and exists therefore only as a “part,” which is to

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 205

say, only in and for something else. Parsons is thus centrally con-
cerned with discerning "the foundational reference of all particular
conditions and processes to the state of the total system as a going
concern” (italics mine). It is precisely this organic vision, which
implies that parts lack reality without membership in a totality,
that induces the multiplicity /simultaneity hastiness that contrib-
utes so much to Parsons’ obscurity.

THE CONCEPTUAL SYSTEM AS ICON

In general. Parsons’ overall style pf work seems very similar to
Comte's. Indeed, the similarity between the two is not a super-
ficial one, and we might well think of Parsons as a latter-day
Comte. For one thing, the taxonomic, formal quality of Parsons’
work is strikingly like Comte’s compulsive formalism. Comte
started, for example, with certain postulates about human nature,
beginning with the assumption that it was divided into two parts,
intelligence or mind, on the one side, and “heart” or emotion, on
the other. Emotions are then dichotomized into sentiments and
will. Sentiments are further dichotomized into those that are ego-
istic and those that are altruistic. The egoistic sentiments are
divided into the nutritive, sexual, and material, the military and
industrial instincts, and pride and vanity. The altruistic sentiments,
for their part, are subdivided into friendship, veneration, and kind-
ness. The “will” is divided into courage, prudence, and steadfastness.
Then — going back to the other half of the first dichotomy in human
nature — Comte subdivides intelligence or mind into understanding
and expression; the former is passive or active; if passive, it is
abstract or concrete; if active, it is deductive or inductive. Comte
postulates that in the relation between the two basic elements in
human nature, intelligence and emotions, the latter governs action;
man is basically a nonrational creature; intelligence is noble but
weak. There is thus a split in human nature itself, between power
and goodness, or between reality and morality.

Parsons’ work parallels Comte’s both in its taxonomic zeal,
crudely utilizing four-fold tables as a logic machine to chop out
mountains of conceptual distinctions, and also in its basic assump-
tions concerning the nonrationality of human behavior. It is similar,
in short, in both form and content. Man’s behavior is shaped not
by a utilitarian calculus but by nonrational, ultimate values, ac-

206 The World of Talc °tt Parsons

cording to Parsons. Parsons, however, does not speak of “human
nature” but instead moves toward more behavioristic distinctions
between types of social action. Insofar as these entail ivnputcd
states of mind they are not, of course, any more behavioristic or
“empirical” than attributes of human nature. The shift, however,
does imply an emphasis on the great variety of concrete ends that
men may pursue; it implies a drift toward a more relativistic image
of man.

Very importantly, it also implies a more sociologistic picture of
man. While Parsons’ voluntarism places great importance on
man’s effort to realize certain ends, it is paradoxically true that
these ends are no longer seen as derived from him; though they
reside in him, they derive from social systems. Man is a hollowed-
out, empty being filled with substance only by society. Man thus is
seen as an entirely social being, and the possibility of conflict
between man and society is thereby reduced. Man now has and is
nothing of his own that need be counterposed to society.

In his taxonomic fervor — and it is nothing less than that —
Parsons postulates that human action is either instrumental or
noninstrumental. He is then off and running, and the logic machine
goes into high gear. Since the instrumental is for Parsons primarily
cognitive in character, it corresponds to Comte’s mind or intelli-
gence; the noninstrumental corresponds to Comte’s “heart” or emo-
tion. From this point onward, conceptual distinctions fly in all
directions and reproduce promiscuously. New distinctions are
mated to produce new conceptual offspring, and they, in turn, are
bred incestuously either with their parents or with one another to
produce still another generation of concepts.

For example, a distinction is made between forms of action in
terms of their "motivational” and their “value-orientational” dimen-
sions. The latter refers to culturally transmitted standards or norms
by which action is oriented and appraised. The former refers to
internalized drives, or urges toward something, and is further
subdivided into the cognitive, cathectic, and evaluative forms,
which correspond to beliefs, sentiments, and morals. All human
action is further categorized in terms of five pattern variables,
which are discussed dichotomously. Page after page of concepts
and their typological combinations gush forth. Distinctions are
made between the cultural, social, psychological, and biological
levels — the latter being later added, it seems, for the sake of formal
completeness — each of which is seen as a distinctive analytical
system. Social systems are analyzed in terms of their role and
status organization, their aggregate character as collectivities,
their norms and values, their universal functional exigencies and
phases, their adjustment to internal stresses or external boundary-

Persons as a Systems Analyst 207

exchanges, which are, in turn, combined with the instrumental
versus noninstrumental or consummatory dichotomy to produce
four system problems: adaptation, goal-attainment, pattern-
maintenance, and integration. And so on.

For Parsons, the significant test of these concepts is not that
they lead to or may be inserted in testable hypotheses or proposi-
tions; Parsons seems no more interested in this than the unsophis-
ticated compiler of a dictionary was interested in the sentences in
w’hich his inventory of words might be used. The tension-releasing,
triumphant moment for Parsons is when he can "show” that one
set of his categories or concepts may be applied to various social
sectors or to different levels of social life, thus linking them to-
gether. It is w'hen Parsons is able to show the diverse applications
of a single set of concepts, thus reducing the dangle of things, that
he feels he has demonstrated its worth. Diversity of application
of a single category set is his unstated test of value. Similarly,
Parsons also likes elaborate analogies, for while they do not actually
bridge things they resonate a sense of unity.

That different sectors or levels of a universe may be viewed
in terms of the same set of distinctions does not, of course, demon-
strate that the distinctions yield propositions that are scientifically
or practically valuable, or are true or interesting, or lead to the
discovery' of new' facts or the useful reorganization of old ones. One
may, of course, distinguish people in countless ways, say, as red-
heads versus nonredheads, and may find that all human popula-
tions are susceptible to categorization in these terms. One may
even shout, Eureka! and proclaim that the same is true for horses.
But what does this demonstrate about the value of such a distinc-
tion? Does it show it to be better than an alternative distinction,
which, for example, divides the world into bald and hairy people?

Looked at in its grossest and most manifest terms, Parsons’ work
is largely a list of combinations of certain kinds of concepts, and,
in particular, of those that express domain assumptions about man
and society. He is concerned, that is, to assert what is presumably
true of all social action, all societies, all social systems, etcetera. In
a serious sense, then, Parsons is not so much a substantive social
theorist as the grand metaphysician of contemporary sociology. If
I object to Parsons’ metaphysics, however, it is not because I obiect
to metaphysics in general, but only to those that are befuddled.

Yet all this has been said before. Time and again it has been said
and shown 3 that Parsons’ work is primarily a body of analytic
concepts, of categories and typologies of shifting meaning and
fuzzy connotation, w’hose most manifest feature is its obscurity.
To let the matter go after having said this, however, is unsatis-
factory; it does not tell us how this came to be. In particular, it

208 The World of Talcott Parsons

provides no insight into the meaning of Parsons’ conceptual effort
or into the impulses that drive it. To fully understand Parsons we
must see how the many obvious weaknesses in his work are, in a
sense, irrelevant in the light of what he is attempting in his con-
ceptual fervor. Indeed, we must see how the very structural weak-
nesses of his work actually express and achieve his intent. In what
follows I attempt an understanding not of this or that specific
Parsonian concept, but of the structure of his intellectual style,
which is characterized by his blanketing conceptual drive.

As I have indicated, Parsons believes that no aspect of the social
world can be known unless it is set within a whole. He does not
feel that an empirical understanding of the social world can be
seriously furthered unless all of its predicates are first laid out in
advance. Underlying the prolific specification of parts and their
relationships is Parsons’ impulse to relate all the contents in the
whole, leaving nothing without its place. “Exhaustiveness” is the
most important criterion that Parsons tacitly employs in viewing
his sets of categories.

His concern for exhaustiveness, however, is not simply an
expression of his interest in conforming to the logical canons of
correct categorization. For, while these canons do, indeed, call for
exhaustiveness — that every particular be placeable in one of the
concepts in the set of categories — there are, however, other im-
portant criteria for correct categorization to which Parsons pays
scant attention: for example, the criterion of “mutual exclusive-
ness,” which requires that each individual case be locatable in one
and only one category in a set. This, however, requires a con-
ceptual clarity and specificity that Parsons little manifests. In
addition, Parsons pays little or no attention to the more general
standard of parsimony, which prohibits the unjustified proliferation
of distinctions and assumptions.

The most important consideration for Parsons, which is closely
related to his neglect of the criteria of mutual exclusiveness and
of parsimony, is that his concepts and category sets should have no
spaces between them into which things might fall and be lost. For
Parsons, it is far more important that there be at least one concept
into which any and every particular might be put, than that there
be only one concept into which something might be unambiguously
placed. For this reason it is not too important to Parsons if his con-
cepts are fuzzy, if they overlap, if they are ambiguous. Indeed, their
very ambiguity allows them to be stretched and thus further en-
sures their exhaustiveness.

For Parsons, then, the making of conceptual distinctions is his
way of constituting the oneness of the social world. It is his dis-
tinctive way of bringing the world together. His analysis begins

Parsons as a Sijstems Analyst 209

by symbolically constituting a single communality that underlies
the entire social world, a single common plastic dimension, social
action, which is then differentiated into various others (means,
ends, conditions; instrumental and noninstrumental; etcetera)
much as a coin is made up of one metal substance of distin-
guishable elements, some well demarcated, others blurred into one
another. Parsons’ categories thus function as a symbolic representa-
tion and constitution of the social world’s oneness. This oneness is
expressed and communicated by the very weaknesses of his work;
it is conceptually promoted by the promiscuous combining, blend-
ing, bleeding, leaking of his concepts, one into the other, by their
fungus-like capacity to grow out in all directions from a single
spore and to cover the entire territory in shingled layers.

Parsons’ conceptualizations are thus not to be understood merely
as scientifically instrumental or as useful for research; indeed, this
still remains to be shown. They are, in part, ends in themselves.
They really need no research to fulfill their symbolic function.
Their very structure represents Parsons’ vision of the oneness of
the social world. Rather than being exclusively instrumental, they
are like icons, whose very form communicates something vital
about the world.

The revealing thing about Parsons’ individual concepts is that,
characteristically, they are not even sensitizing. They do not
heighten the reader's awareness of certain parts of his environment:
they do not confirm and crystallize his own vague intimations.
They are, typically, not insight-inducing conceptualizations, for in
the end insight is always an insight into some experience. There
is little about the world we experience, whether impressionistically
or systematically known, to which Parsons’ categories appeal. For
they are not intrinsically oriented to any form of empirical sensi-
tivity. Parsons’ categories are, more nearly, self-sufficient con-
ceptual extrusions that cover rather than reveal the world. They
make the world whole by overlaying its gaps, tensions, conflicts,
incompletenesses with a conceptual encrustation. The mountains
of categories to which Parsons’ labors have given birth are the
product of an inward search for the world’s oneness and a projec-
tion of his vision of that oneness.

210

The World of Talcott Parsons

PARSONS AS SYSTEM ANALYST

In its holism Parsons’ domain assumptions are only superficially
similar to the Marxist conception of society as a system and to its
concern with capitalist systems. For, influenced by the Hegelian
tradition, Marx had felt that the divisions in the world, its nega-
tions, internal contradictions, and class conflicts, were its deepest
reality. To Marx the cleavages in the world were of its essence.
In a way, the world did not become fully real to him until it was
divided against itself. It is not the cleavages in the social world
that are real to Parsons, however, but its unbroken oneness: the
fact that it all grows out of one elemental stuff, social action, into
increasingly differentiated structures. At any rate, this is one of the
ways in which Parsons constitutes the oneness of the social world.
The most important expression of Parsons’ vision of the oneness of
the social world, however, is his conception of it as a system.
Parsons thus actually has two different metaphors in terms of
which unity is expressed : the social world as organic differentiation
from a common substance, and the social world as a single system.
The metaphor of organic differentiation is less focal and controlled;
the metaphor of system is labeled and deliberately employed.
Protoplasmic organic differentiation is the genetics of oneness;
system mechanics are the synchronies of oneness. There is a hint
of a Rousseaueanism here: social systems are bom as living
organisms, but everywhere they are becoming machines.

PROBLEMS OF SYSTEM ANALYSIS 4

From the standpoint of Parsons’ system analysis three very general
questions emerge. First, as Parsons indicates, “the most general
and fundamental property of a system is the interdependence of
parts or variables.” Questions therefore arise concerning the char-
acter of interdependence. Second, there is the problem of system
maintenance. Systems may maintain some measure of stability
through processes of “boundary exchange” and through mecha-
nisms which restore their “equilibrium” when this is perturbed.
Much of Parsons’ system analysis, then, resolves itself into ques-

211

Parsons as a Systems Analyst

tions either about the nature of system interdependence or about
the nature of system-stabilizing forces, boundary-maintaining or
equilibrating mechanisms. Clearly, however, system interdepend-
ence and equilibrium are analytically independent, for while
equilibrium implies interdependence, interdependence does not
necessarily imply equilibrium. Third, and finally, we will also want
to know what Parsons thinks about system change, that is, the
ways in which systems may change, either in their internal dy-
namics or in their structure as a whole.

But even before any of these basic problems can be explored,
we must ask how the constituent components of the social system
are identified by Parsons. His assumption is, as we have seen,
that it is not possible to interpret any single social pattern except
by referring it to some larger systemic whole. Parsons assumes
that the whole system must be conceptually constituted prior to
the empirical investigation of any specific part or pattern. In
consequence, Parsons is led forthwith to the specification of all
the parts of the social system, of its entire anatomy, in an effort
to identify all of its potentially consequential components. Pre-
sumably, this should make it possible systematically to refer any
one part to all the component structures constituting the system.
But since this must take place prior to the empirical study of any
one part, all the constituent elements of the whole system can be
immediately constituted only by some form of ex cathedra
postulation.

The problem is that, whether or not a given part of the social
anatomy is in fact “there” or whether it is useful even to postulate
it, is to an important degree resolvable only by research. The speci-
fication of the component elements of a social system is no more
attainable by theoretical postulation alone than are the attributes
of those “living” systems with which biologists deal. But Parsons
makes no systematic use of empirical operations in constituting the
elements in his social system, thinking that this must be done
a priori , in a purely theoretical manner.

Parsons’ insistence upon the immediate postulation and constitu-
tion of a “social system” as a whole is, he explains, justified on the
basis of its superior explanatory power. But its real grounding is
in Parsons’ metaphysics. So far as I am aware Parsons’ recom-
mended procedure has never been shown to explain (the variance
in) any single problematic social pattern more fully — or in any
other sense, better than — some other strategy of explanation.

The main advantage of Parsons’ system approach seems to be
that it does communicate an image of the oneness of human
groups. Indeed, this is really one of Parsons’ most important con-
tributions. More than any other modem social theorist, he has

212 The World of Talcott Parsons

persuasively communicated a sense of the reality of a social system,
of the boundaried oneness and coherent wholeness of patterns of
social interaction. All this, however, is done entirely — and this is
the paradoxical aspect for those who merely complain about
Parsons’ literary style — through the sheer force of his conceptualiz-
ing rhetoric. For all his ambiguity and obscurity, he has been able
to conjure an image of a special something, the social system,
and to evoke a sense of its reality by what axe, in the last analysis,
entirely literary means. It is this communicated sense of the whole-
ness of a group, and not any demonstrably great explanatory
power, to which Parsons’ system analysis owes much of its appeal.
It gives sociologists a sense of the tangible substantiality of a
special entity that they feel it is their special business to explore,
and thereby helps to legitimate their existence as a distinct
discipline.

When Parsons stipulates the structure of a “social system,"
exhibiting the elements out of which he constitutes it, his nuclear
conception is of an Ego and an Alter, that is, two or more role play-
ers engaged in interaction with one another, conforming to or de-
parting from one another’s expectations, hating some measure of
complementarity in their expectations, so that what Ego regards
as his rights are viewed by Alter as his duties, and vice versa;
this complementarity is, in its turn, dependent upon a common
orientation to a set of moral values that they share. It is, in large
part, because Parsons centers his conception of social systems on
the interaction between Ego and Alter that it has its great appeal,
particularly to Americans. The Ego-Alter formulation hints at the
presence of individuals somewhere in the system by giving them
differentiated role locations; the distinctive properties of groups are
thus not formulated in a manner that obliterates their connection
with individual behavior. Parsons’ focus is not, as Durkheim’s often
•was, on the utter autonomy of social phenomena, on the social as
a reality sui generis, or on the group as an “association” of undif-
ferentiated roles. Thus Parsons establishes the coherence and
systemic character of the group as such while still allowing a place
for persons, if not the persons themselves.

It is clear, however, that, from Parsons’ formulation of the social
system, elements in men’s biological constitution and physiological
functioning, as well as features of their physical and ecological
environment, are excluded. So too are the historically evolving
cultural complexes of material objects, including tools and ma-
chines, even though these are man’s own unique and distinctive
creations, the very products and the mediating elements of his
social interaction and communication, and even though they also
include those instruments of transportation which make possible

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 213

the very interchanges among social parts that constitute their
interdependence. In exiling these “material” elements from the
social system, Parsons at best derives a purely formal advantage:
that is, the demarcation of a distinct class of systems, which may
form the object of a distinct social science discipline. But in doing
this he undermines a systematic place for numerous cogent re-
searches — perhaps, particularly, the ecological — which, if lacking
in formal elegance in this sense, might illuminate the important
ways in which social behavior is patterned. Similarly, the actual
embodied individual is also exiled from the social system and flits
through it phantom-like, only materialized momentarily as he
passes through role locations.

To establish the social system in this manner may accomplish
the objective of chartering an independent social science. But it
seems a Pyrrhic victory, bought at the cost of a scientific ritualism
in which logical elegance is substituted for empirical potency. It
is vulnerable to Ruskin’s sarcasm about constituting a science of
gymnastics that postulates men having no skeletons.

SYSTEM INTERDEPENDENCE

The problem of “interdependence” is central to Parsons’ concept of
a social system, as it is to any. It is notable, however, that Parsons
rarely gives the concept of “interdependence” systematic and formal
analysis; he tends instead to take it as a given rather than making
it problematic in its most general implications. Perhaps the basic
reason for this is that for Parsons the concept of system interde-
pendence has a polemical vector in it. Built into it there is a coun-
terstatement against those social theories, such as Marxism, which
he interprets as implying that some social factors are independent,
since they are held to determine outcomes in the long run. Thus,
for Parsons the initial value of the concept of interdependence is
that it undermines assumptions concerning the independence of
certain social factors and, with this, their determinism. Since any
change in a system presumably acts on it in numerous ways, an
underlying moral of Parsons’ system is unpredictability. For Par-
sons, a system is a surprise machine.

Interdependence for Parsons is, therefore, antideterministic. In
the Structure of Social Action, for example, Parsons stresses that
system parts are interdependent with one another. And he adds

2*4 The World of Taleott Parsons

that, “in a system of interdependent variables . . . the value of any
one variable is not completely determined unless those of all the
others are known.'’ This formulation clearly, albeit only implicitly,
reveals the improbability, if not the impossibility, of knowing the
value of any variable in a social system. For, no one thing can be
"completely determined” — in a system — unless everything is;
which means, in effect, that nothing is completely determined. It
is therefore because the rhetorical function of the concept of sys-
tem interdependence is, for Parsons, very largely to polemicize
against deterministic theories that postulate the independent causal
significance of certain social factors, that he has little reason to
analyze the concept of a system formally. For him the concept of
a system need be clarified only enough to perform its antideter-
ministic function.

Nevertheless, even on a formal level of system analysis, different
things may be predicated about systems; it is necessary to choose
among competing formal models and to identify those that promise
to have a better “fit” to the known, relevant data, for there are
significantly different kinds of systems. Mere commitment to the
concept of an empirical "system” is empty; it is much as if a
mathematical physicist were to commit himself to the use of
“geometry” in general, rather than specifying which system of
geometry he proposed to use involving his problems.

The concept of “system” is purely formal and, like those used in
mathematics, is devoid of empirical content. When a formal system
is applied to a specific subject matter, it is said to be "interpreted.”
Some formal systems have many interpretations, others have none.
The nub of the issue here is the nature of the interpretation to be
given, when the formal and empty notion of a system is applied
to human affairs. Parsons does, indeed, provide such an interpreta-
tion. But it is, at one level of analysis, an ad hoc and meta-
physically-driven interpretation, because he never sees that, on the
formal level, there are different conceptions of systems that might
be applied, never explicitly says which one he is applying, what
its character is, and why he uses it. This we must, at best, infer
from the concrete applications he makes. He tells us what his
social system is, but not what his social system is. In short, he
has given only the most primitive analysis to the formal concept
of a system, allowing matters to rest very largely with the affirma-
tion that it has the unexamined attributes of interdependence and
self-maintenance, or equilibrium.

It makes a good deal of difference, however, whether inter-
dependence and equilibrium are analyzed as dimensions capable
of significant variability or, instead, conceptualized as substance-
like entities. If this dimensionality is not recognized, there is a

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 215

compelling tendency to conceive of systems as things that have
interdependence and have equilibrium, and thus to miss that these
are the positive values of dimensions. Systems have varying
degrees of interdependence and of equilibrium, and it is easy to
forget that what we have to deal with is not a system but “system-
ness.” In effect, the Parsonian conception of a system, focusing as
it does on only one extreme of the dimension, does not confront
the variable states a system might have.

FUNCTIONAL AUTONOMY AND INTERDEPENDENCE

Rather than conceiving of systems in terms of the “interdepend-
ence” of their elements, one could just as truly define a system as
a group of elements that have low “functional autonomy” with
respect to one another. In other words, systems might be conceived
of as elements or parts having some interchanges with one another,
and each of the parts might thus have varying degrees of depend-
ence on or autonomy from the others. Some parts might have all or
most of their needs satisfied by such interchanges, while others
might have relatively few; the former may be said to have low
functional autonomy, and the latter, high functional autonomy.
In this sense a system might be defined as a group of elements
whose interchanges restrict their functional autonomy.

To conceptualize systems in terms of their interdependence, as
Parsons does, tends to focus primarily on the “whole” and on the
close connectedness of the parts. It tends to stress the oneness of the
whole. A conception of systems in terms of “functional autonomy”
tends, quite differently, to focus on the parts themselves, and it
stresses that their connectedness is problematic. A concept of
interdependence focuses on the parts only in their implication
within a system. It sees them as "real” only in and for a system.
A concept of functional autonomy, however, raises the question of
the extent of this implication and, more distinctively, focuses on
the other, extrasystem involvements of the parts.

In other words, in conceiving of systems as made up of inter-
dependent parts, the parts are conceived of only in their system
character. In conceiving of systems as made up of more or less
functionally autonomous elements, however, the elements are not
merely “parts” but are seen to exist in and for "themselves.” They
are seen to have an existence apart from any given system in which
they are involved; their reality does not depend solely upon their

216 The World of Talcott Parsons

involvement in the system under examination. From the standpoint
of functional autonomy, then, the analysis of social systems has a
different emphasis than does Parsons’. For example, from Parsons’
standpoint emphasis is placed on the mechanisms that protect the
interdependence and equilibrium of the system as a whole; from
our standpoint, emphasis would also be placed on the identification
and analysis of the mechanisms that protect the functional
autonomy of the parts. The latter may require the reduction of
high degrees of interdependence if they threaten the parts’ au-
tonomy, and it may also give rise to a resistance to pressures for
equilibrium. In short, parts with some degree of functional au-
tonomy would be expected to resist full integration into or increased
dependence upon the larger system or upon other elements in it.

From this standpoint, in fine, two opposing forces are con-
tinually at work in all social systems. First, there is the tendency
of the parts to protect whatever measure of functional autonomy
they already possess or even to extend it further; there is a tend-
ency for each part to maintain its own boundaries and to resist
fuller and more complete integration into the larger system.

Second, there is the tendency of the system itself, or more
accurately, of those parts that are charged or identify with system
management, to strive toward fuller integration, reducing the
autonomy of the parts and increasing their submission to the
requirements of the system as a whole, as they, the system man-
agers, define it. These integrating pressures are exerted by a system
part, the managerial element, which, if identifying itself with the
entire system, is nonetheless like any other part with its own vested
interests in functional autonomy. Integrating forces therefore
always contain two opposing elements: those deriving from the
intrinsic, but managerially interpreted requirements of the system
for a measure of integration, and those deriving from the special
interests of the managerial part in the maintenance of some
measure of autonomy for itself. In short, tendencies toward system
integration inherently tend toward “oligarchical” centralization, for
they, are always interpreted and implemented by some system part
which has its own distinct drive toward functional autonomy.
Correspondingly, it is precisely these oligarchical tendencies that
threaten the autonomy of the other parts of the system, generate
opposition to oligarchy, polarize the system around an internal
conflict, and, in effect, constitute an “iron law” of opposition to
oligarchy.

Parsons as a Systems Analyst

217

MORAL CODES AS CONDUCTOR S OF TENSION

Such as it is, then, the integration of the system is at best an
inherently tense and precarious balancing of forces. At any given
moment it is the result of the changing balance of power among
the parts and of their shifting alliances; it registers the outcome of
the various pressures in the negotiated compromises which are
achieved. To say this, however, is not to say that moral consider-
ations do not limit autonomy strivings and do not influence the
system parts in their effort to preserve or extend their functional
autonomy in their negotiations with one another. At the same time,
moral considerations and shared values do not fully govern the
outcomes. For, on a different level, considerations of morality and
considerations of “interest” in functional autonomy are themselves
in a tensionful relationship with one another. The conflicts between
integration and autonomy are not eliminated, nor for that matter
are they merely “controlled” by shared moral norms, for the tensions
are, in fact, expressed through the moral norms and through their
relations to other commitments.

This is so for several reasons. First, due to the very fact that
different parts have different degrees of commitment to a given
social system, they are differentially committed — some more, some
less — to that system's moral code. Second, the moral rules them-
selves are not given automatic and mechanical conformity simply
because they, in some sense, “exist”; the varying degrees of con-
formity given by different system parts are a function of different
parts’ bargaining positions; conformity is not so much given as
negotiated, and this, in turn, will reflect the actors’ varying degrees
of functional autonomy. Third, there is differential conformity to a
single moral rule at different times, depending, in part, on whether
it restricts or enhances one’s functional autonomy; a moral rule
is given more support by a part w’hen it furthers than when it
restricts or reduces its autonomy. Conformity with or enforcement
of the same rule often has different consequences, losses or gains,
for the autonomy of different parts. The tension between the parts
is reflected in the different interpretations each seeks to impose on
any rule. The rule thus serves as a vehicle through -which the
tension is expressed ; it becomes a focus around which conflict
develops. Fourth, there is usually more than one rule in a moral
code that can be claimed to be relevant to a decision and in terms
of which it may be legitimated. A central factor influencing one’s

21 8 The World of Talcott Parsons

choice of a specific rule to govern a decision is its expected con-
sequences for the functional autonomy of the part. There is there-
fore conflict about which of several rules applies in any case. Each
part tends to opt for the rule that it believes will optimize its
functional autonomy. What one conceives to be moral, tends to
vary with one’s interests.

In any interaction between parts, therefore, the existence of a
shared moral code does not necessarily reduce friction, for each
may define a different rule as governing the interaction and each
may interpret the same rule in different ways. Consequently, the
fact that the parts all subscribe to a common moral code does not
in the least ensure that their relations with one another will be
“complementary,” and that those things regarded by one part as
“rights” will be viewed by the other as “obligations.” To the con-
trary, the underlying impulse of all parts to protect and extend their
functional autonomy ensures that the moral code itself often be-
comes the very language in which their conflicts, competitions, and
tensions are expressed. A moral code does not eliminate the ten-
sions inherent in a social system; at the very most it provides a
restraint on these inherent tensions; and at the very least it pro-
vides a language in which tensions are given public expressions
and become the focus around which they are organized. Tensions
abide.

THE SOCIAL SYSTEM AND THE SELF 5

These general considerations, I am well aware, are essentially
metaphysical in character, but Parsons is above all a metaphysician.
His system metaphysics need to be applied to various levels. For
example, when the Parsonsian conception of a system is brought
to bear on the relationship between individual persons and the
group as a whole, what is emphasized is the individual’s plastic
potentiality for conformity. Emphasis is placed on the conformity
of individuals with the requirements of the social position in which
they find themselves or with the needs of the group; thus tensions
between the individual and the group are seen not as intrinsic but
as fortuitous, not as universal but as situational. Conceiving of
the individual as an entirely “social” creature, as an empty,
hollowed-out container that depends entirely upon experience in
and training by social systems, it denies that there need be any
conflict. Instead, it draws attention to the power of the socializing

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 219

process and to the malleability of the individual, which, in prin-
ciple, might produce so complete a fit as totally to eliminate con-
flicts between individual and group. A theoretical model that im-
plies this, however, has one fatal flaw: it fails to correspond to the
facts known about any social system ever studied.

Indeed, the very malleability of an organism viewed — as in
Parsons’ model — as susceptible to almost any kind of socialization,
by any one social system, is precisely what allows it to be resocialized
by and in another. Organism-malleability does not ensure the
elimination of conflict between the individual and society; quite
the contrary, it underwrites a measure of functional autonomy for
the person and, with this, an inevitable tension between the group
and the individual.

Once socialized, moreover, individuals may remain socialized
even though separated from their original system; many persons
manifest a capacity to generate an “escape velocity” and flee to
refuge elsewhere. Certainly human beings are not invariably
characterized by a total dependence upon any one social system.
Here it is relevant to note one central difference between the
primary socialization of young people conducted by families or
family-surrogates, which is relatively unspecialized, and the
secondary and more specialized socialization provided by those
groups that train adults. In the course of primary socialization,
while the child is prepared to participate in the roles and groups
of the larger society, he commonly learns how to participate as a
member of various groups. The very nature of primary socializa-
tion, then, serves not to provide well-tooled parts for any one
specific group, but to ensure a measure of functional autonomy for
the individual by virtue of preparing him to participate in various
different groups : it creates "persons.” Primary socialization means
that the child’s own interests are, in some part, regarded as separate
from those of any one particular group; it means that he is being
prepared for those diverse involvements that may optimize his
unique individual fulfillment. Indeed, the inculcation of motives
toward, and skills to facilitate, a measure of functional autonomy
is one important function of primary socialization. Character-
istically, however, what Parsons emphasizes in such socialization
is the transmission of skills and dispositions that make the in-
dividual useful to the system.

Parsons’ description of training for “autonomy” during primary
socialization is not only extremely undeveloped and sketchy, but
also largely focused on what is required to emancipate the child
from his family so that he may then pass on and enter into roles
in other groups.® For all his polemic against "utilitarianism,” the
pathos of a utilitarian culture echoes in Parson’s Functionalism.

220

The World of Talcott Parsons

Socialized individuals have some measure of mobility, vertical or
horizontal, among the social systems.within their society, and they
move with varying degrees of ease or stress from one to another.
Moreover, they may and do migrate to or sojourn in societies quite
different from those in which they were originally socialized. They
apparently have considerable, if varying, degrees of functional
autonomy relative to all concrete social systems. Consequently, we
cannot think of socialized persons as "raw materials” or even as
“parts” fashioned by the social systems for their use.

Human beings are as much engaged in using social systems as
in being used by them. Men are social system-using and social
system-building creatures. They are not merely viewed inadequately
when seen one-sidedly as “social products,” but are also seriously
misunderstood if viewed simply as social beings, if by that is meant
sociable beings, friendly little fellows eagerly waiting to cooperate
with others. For, the human self develops and grows with social
differences, in part, and consequently often seeks and needs
confrontations.

The development of self involves development of the discrimi-
nating processes which perceive likenesses and differences. It is
not, however, the likenesses but the differences that become crucial
in distinguishing the self from others. And furthermore, not all
differences between men are equally critical, and none so prob-
lematic as those whose consequences threaten or supply grati-
fications and reduce or avoid deprivations. And it is especially when
the differences between men lead them into contention or conflict
that these are most likely to be perceived. It is when men differ
with one another that they are most likely ter be aware of their
differences from one another. It is when Ego demands things
which Alter is not inclined to provide that Ego needs to take stock,
to clarify his differences with Alter; from this does Ego’s perception
of his own self grow.

The development of Ego’s self depends, in part, not on his in-
volvement in a system of mutual conformity with Alter but also on
the breakdown in their complementarity. The cumulation and
organization of his perceived differences with others shapes Ego’s
perception of his differences from others, thus forming the bound-
aries of his self. These differences that Ego has with and from
others become introjected and experienced as the critical distinc-
tion of himself, as his “individuality.” What the self is taken to be
and the extent to which Ego is consciously aware of this self is
influenced by and realized in his social conflict with others. The
self increasingly becomes an object to itself when its impulses are
not reflexively in keeping with the expectations of the other and as
it experiences responses not completely in keeping with its own.

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Parsons as a Systems Analyst

The self grows out of social interaction with others, from which
its social contents are derived and by which are shaped its shared
similarities w'ith, and individual differences from, others. Different
aspects of the self are affected by different kinds of social inter-
action. The self is faced with the task of locating and enhancing
itself on both the “goodness" and the “potency” dimensions, and of
bringing the two into equilibrium, just as it must for all objects.
The self may, for example, experience self-esteem when it con-
forms with the expectations of others and with group values; it
thus wins approval and experiences itself as “good." But self-esteem
is not the same as self-regard, which arises from a sense of the
seifs -potency. Unlike self-esteem, self-regard may be experienced
when the self -violates the expectations of others, when the self
manifests a capacity to express distance or autonomy from others
and their demands, rather than conformity or involvement with
them. Self esteem derives from consensual validation; self-regard
derives from conflictual validation, which the self may experience
when it manifestly becomes something to be reckoned with, even
if not approved by others, and when it thus validates its autonomy.
Self-regard may be experienced when the self can realize its goals
despite others’ resistance and when therefore it may deviate from
rather than conform with culturally prevalent standards.

The self experiences itself as “good” when it is approved or loved
by others, as in consensual validation, and as potent and autono-
mous when it stands against others, as in conflictual validation.
Consensual validation, however, since it is given for conformity
with social values, makes the self like other selves and blurs its
identifiability and individuality. Without some tensions with others,
without the individuating, boundary-forming sense of difference
from others, the line between self and other grows wavery and
indistinct. Conflict, therefore, is every bit as important as con-
sensual validation in the development of an individuated, accept-
able, and mature identity.

Imagine something like the complete reverse of the experiments
conducted by S. A. Asch: rather than subjecting the individual to
others who all differ sharply with his judgments, imagine an
experiment in which total agreement and consensual validation
are given by all others to some individual. He is given everything
he wants; he is told that everything he believes is correct; he is
shown that everything he says is understood and accepted; never
for a moment, then, does anyone in the group differ in any way
from him. According to the view that stresses the importance of
consensual validation, this man should be fulfilled and happy.
According to the view implied in conflictual validation, however,
he should at some point manifest stress and distress, for the main-

222

The World of Talcott Parsons

tenance of self requires some measure of tension with others. Be-
cause there can be no stable self without some boundaries and
some differences with others, the self may seek out and sharpen its
differences with others so that it may clarify its differences from
them. The maintenance of the highly developed self, then, entails
a rift between self and society. Thus the highly developed self,
although emerging in social interaction, is not simply a product of
amiable sociability. It is not totally committed to friendly co-
operation with others, but it also requires some measure of conflict
for its very survival: it must at some point fight the system of
which it is a part and those who wish to subject it to that system.

The embodied and socialized individual is both the most em-
pirically obvious human system and the most complex and highly
integrated of all human systems; as a system, he is far more
integrated than any known “social system.” In his embodiment,
the biological, psychological, social, and cultural all conjoin. They
are “bound together” in him far more tightly than are the elements
of any other system; embodied, socialized man is not simply a
“part,” he is the nexus and the bond of all human levels and
systems, the modality in which and through which all their
energies are concentrated and discharged.

The amount of sheer energy located in the embodied individual
is always greater than that available to contain or resist him at the
particular sector of any social system in which he operates; even
when a social system ceases to control him only with “social bonds”
and instead builds prisons, he can find and make his way out.
There is really only one way in which a social system can be
absolutely confident that it controls the man bent on overcoming
its restrictions, and that is to kill him. There is no known social
system whose requirements he cannot evade or which he cannot
shake or destroy. A single assassin with a single gun can, and has,
spread disruption and despair in the most powerful nations on
earth. And a single creative individual, open to the needs of others
and the opportunities of his time, can be a nucleus of spreading
hope and accomplishment. A model of a social system, such as
Parsons’, which oversrtresses the interdependence of system “parts,”
simply cannot come to terms with these and other expressions of
the potency and functional autonomy of individuals.

The system model that Parsons favors conduces to an emphasis
on interdependence-induced oneness and to a lopsided focus on
the ways that individuals are prepared to conform to the expecta-
tions of others or to satisfy the needs of their social systems. The
focus is on the mechanisms of social integration that accept in-
dividuals into social solidarities or reduce social distance among
them; on the mechanisms of defense that reduce tension among

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 223

them; or on the adaptive mechanisms that adjust the system to its
environment and that reduce friction with it. All these are vital
processes; no analysis of human interaction that ignores them can
be adequate. But when they become the overweening focus of social
analysis they warp rather than inform it; for they lead the analysis
to neglect the equally significant "avoidance” side of the equation,
in which socialized individuals, and other social units, commonly
and with success seek to resist total inclusion in any social system,
for that would involve the loss of their functional autonomy.
Parsons’ system model tends to assume that the “organization” of
a system, that is, the particular arrangement of its parts, provides
primarily for avenues of integration among the parts. From the
standpoint of a system model responsive to “functional autonomy,”
however, “organization” serves not only to link, control, and in-
terrelate parts; it serves also to separate them, to maintain distance
among them, and to protect their functional autonomy.

Parsons emphasizes that social systems are systems of role be-
havior and of interaction among role players. Here the emphasis
is on the ways that personality is integrated into the social system,
involved in consistent satisfaction of its needs, and brought into
reliable cooperation with others. Roles, in short, are viewed as
mechanisms by which persons are integrated into systems. Yet it
is of the essence of social roles that they never demand total in-
volvement; even when role obligations are numerous and diffuse
the person is never exposed to unlimited obligation. Roles are
always construed so as to turn in two directions, toward the main-
tenance of the system and toward the maintenance of a measure of
functional autonomy for the participating individuals. To say that
a person is an “actor” in a social system, as Parsons does, is to
stress that he plays a role in a social system, is subject to some
system controls, and has obligations to the group in which his role
has a part. At the same time, however, to say that he is a role-
playing actor implies, though Parsons too often fails to make it
explicit, that the person has only a limited involvement in any one
social system and, precisely because of this, has a reality and
potency apart from all social systems.

Although Parsons is at pains to stress the different levels of
integration and analysis (the biological, psychological, cultural,
and social system levels), in none of these is a conceptual pro-
vision made that would focus directly and systematically on a
human system, and thus would enable us to take seriously the
embodied socialized person who moves in, through, and between
social systems, and who uses, creates, and destroys them during
the course of his life cycle and career. In Parsons’ social world, the
human system, the embodied socialized individual, is not recog-

224 The World of Talcott Parsons

nized outside the other four levels. The human system disappears
in Parsons' framework; it escapes through the mesh of his con-
ceptual system. It is as if Parsons’ social world consists of a series
of partially overlapping circles of light; when the embodied person
leaves one circle or social system he disappears, becoming visible
again only after he enters and is “plugged into” the next circle.
Parsons thus totally inverts the entire world of everyday experience.
For, in that everyday world it is the embodied individual that is
most continuously in evidence, and not the social systems in which
he participates. Paradoxically, then. Parsons transforms the em-
bodied individual from the most to the least visible. It is as if the
obvious existence of people is an embarrassment; as his theoretical
system develops, especially as it moves from “action schema” to
“social system” analysis, the embodied and socialized individual is
lost from sight. 7

ANOMIE AS DE-DIFFERENTIATION

Because Parsons’ conceptual system fails to focus on the embodied
socialized individual as a distinctive unit, it fails to understand
how the continuity of cultural (as distinct from social) systems is
furthered by and maintained through people, and how this con-
tinuity may be preserved quite apart from that of specific social
systems. When a social system has failed to solve its problems
and is destroyed as such, the individuals do not, of course,
necessarily disappear with it. The social system often then de-
differentiates back into its more elemental components, into smaller
primary groups or individuals, which can and frequently do sur-
vive. From the standpoint of that specific social system this is a
period of “disorder” or of anomic crisis. But from the standpoint
of both the component individuals and the cultural system, this is
a cutting of bonds that releases them to try something else that
might better succeed. Anomic disorder may unbind wasted energies,
sever fruitless commitments; it may make possible a ferment of
innovation that can rescue the individuals, or the cultural system,
from destruction.

When a social system has fruitlessly exhausted its routine solu-
tions for its problems, then anomic randomness may be more use-
ful to individuals and to the culture they bear, than are the tread-
mill and orderly plying of the old structures. Limited increases in
the randomness of social systems — that is, growing anomie — may

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 225

be useful for the human and the cultural systems. In this view
the "anomic” person is not merely an uncontrolled "social cancer”
but may be a seed pod of vital culture which, if only through sheer
chance, may fall upon fertile ground. The functional autonomy of
embodied, socialized individuals, implying as it does the possibility
of their survival apart from a specific social system, helps maintain
the cultural system. For, the cultural system, the historically ac-
cumulated heritage of beliefs and skills, is, at least in some
measure, still preserved within embodied individuals even after
their dissociation from specific social systems.

The continuity and safety of cultural systems as such derive, in
some part, from the fact that embodied individuals are always
socialized to have a measure of functional autonomy and are in-
vested with far more of the culture than they require for successful
operation within the single social system. Indeed, the security of
cultural systems requires that individuals not be overly specialized
vis-a-vis the needs of any particular social system. Seen from this
perspective the socialized person’s functional autonomy serves to
enhance the continuity of cultural systems precisely by loosening
his dependence upon the fate of his social system. From this stand-
point the embodied individual is much more akin to a “seed” or
germinal material than to a system "part” or organ, for the latter
view sees only his specialized function vis-a-vis a social system. He
contains within himself the "information” that can reproduce an
entire culture, as well as the energy that enables him to “imprint”
this information upon patterns of behavior and to strand these
together into social systems.

In stressing the potency and autonomy of the socialized indi-
vidual in his relation to the social systems, one must also avoid
picturing the individual as passive in relation to the cultural sys-
tems. For, when cultural patterns fail to gratify the individual in
a specific environment, including tire social systems, he may and
does modify them; that is, the embodied individual can extricate
himself from conventional beliefs and traditional skills, no less
than from social systems. And he will, as in the occurrence of
“organized” deviance, construct new social systems within whose
confines he may protect himself from the claims of old cultural
patterns and secure support for new ones. If, on the one hand, the
individual's extensive enculturation provides him with a measure
of functional autonomy in relation to social systems, on the other
hand, his capacity to create and maintain social systems provides
him with a measure of functional autonomy from specific cultural
systems. Each type of system provides him with leverage on the
other; he uses them both.

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The World of Talcott Parsons

WEIGHTING THE SYSTEM ELEMENTS

Throughout these comments I have stressed that “interdependence”
is not a constant substance, but a variable dimension. And if there
are degrees of interdependence, there must also be degrees of in-
dependence or functional autonomy. Consequently, even within a
system of interdependent parts, the various parts can have varying
degrees of independence.

Having gone this far, it is now evident that a stress on the “web
of interdependence” within a system does not relieve a theorist of
the problem of weighting the differential contributions of the differ-
ent elements to the system outcomes. Different system parts make
different contributions to any state of the system; they contribute
differentially both to changes in and to the stabilizing of the system,
and this needs to be identified systematically and studied em-
pirically. Parsons, however, fails to undertake this, largely because
his starting point is a polemic against the view that there are
“one or two inherently primary sources of impetus to change in
social systems,” to which he counterposes an emphasis on the
sheer “plurality of possible origins of change .” 8 Since his version
of system analysis is motivated, in important part, by an effort to
undermine “single factor” theories or variants of them, he is largely
content to let the matter rest simply with an affirmation of an
unspecified “interdependence” of unweighted elements.

System analysis centering on a doctrine of the interdependence
of elements had long been a central assumption in the sociological
tradition from which Parsons’ theory emerges. It was clearly at
work as early as Saint-Simon, and it was used by Comte. Not, how-
ever, until Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski was it fully explicated,
and Parsons gives it its most methodologically self-conscious treat-
ment. Today, among American Functionalists, the doctrine of
interdependence is a domain assumption so widely and uncritically
accepted as to be almost an item of professional faith, and more
likely to be given ritualistic reaffirmation than rigorous inspection.
The doctrine of interdependence appears so intuitively cogent to
many social scientists as to be beyond question. It is an almost
unquestioned part of their occupational culture.

The formulation of the interdependence doctrine given widest
credence is one which asserts that human groups and cutlures
are to be seen as composed of mutually influential elements. In this
terse but relatively “strong” form the doctrine of interdependence

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Parsons as a Systems Analyst

seems persuasive. Yet, in a different but equivalent form this same
postulate is manifestly “weak”: in social and cultural phenomena,
“everything influences everything else.” There is no operational, no
researchable difference between the strong and weak versions of
the doctrine of interdependence. The only difference is in their
metaphysical pathos; that is, in the sentiments they resonate
congenially. The first version appears cogent, strong, and somehow
significant; the second is quite obviously trivial and weak.

The weak form, however, has at least one merit: it makes it
evident that a number of important questions are being begged or
ignored. Granted that, by one definition, elements in a system are
mutually interdependent. Still, one must ask: Are they all inter-
dependent in the same degree, or are some more or less functionally
autonomous in relation to the system as a whole or to other
elements or subsystems within it? Granted that the elements of
a system, by one definition, all influence one another to some
degree. One must still ask: Do they all influence one another, or
the larger system, to the same extent?

These and related questions cannot be answered simply by quali-
tative and clinical case studies — indispensable though they are —
for their solution demands the use of some kind of mathematics.
Such questions imply a quantitative difference in the way the
system elements determine any given outcome, and they therefore
require quantitative analysis. Until recently. Functionalists were
able to beg quantification because it was impossible without the
use of mathematical tools which did not exist. A Parsonsian
system model that simply made a vague affirmation of the “inter-
dependence” of parts did, however, permit a qualitative analysis.
While this engendered, of course, very indeterminate solutions,
such empirical operations did resonate the felt sense of the world’s
oneness, without violating the antideterministic impulse animating
the larger theory. The vague doctrine of interdependence permitted
Functionalists to conduct and develop their limited empirical ex-
plorations of concrete groups and specific societies: it enabled them
to do some work.

We may better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the
Parsonsian model of system analysis if we understand the model
to which it saw itself as responding and, indeed, if we see the
larger family of possible models, of which it is only one. The
Parsonsian model of system analysis was a polemic against those
models that stressed the importance of “one or two inherently
primary sources of impetus to change in social systems.” We may
term the latter model a “single factor model.” But the Parsonsian
was not the only response to the single factor model, there being
another that we will term the “multiple causation model.” We can

228 The World of Talcott Parsons

begin with the single factor model that generated two responses,
of which the Parsonsian was only one :

The Single Factor Model: In its crudest and “ideal typical”
form, this model seemingly asserted, or was taken to assert, that
some single factor — for example, economy, race, or climate — ac-
counted for all other cultural and social phenomena at all times
and places. Marxism, of course, has frequently been construed pre-
cisely as such a single factor model. While this has been debated,
I see no profit in pursuing that debate here, since it was often
understood by its opponents in this way and it was to this concep-
tion of it that they made their response.

What, then, was a single factor model thought to be? In one
formulation, such a model could be said to premise a distinction
between “dependent” and “independent” variables. The model re-
quires that one examine many dependent variables in their relation
to one independent variable. In other words, it takes as its task to
demonstrate the diversity of effects generated by this single inde-
pendent variable, and to show that changes in any and all of the
dependent variables can be traced to a previous change in the
preferred independent variable.

Thus simply construed, the single factor model obviously pos-
sessed both logical and empirical defects. For example, it failed to
make systematic provision for the ways in which the assorted de-
pendent variables mutually affected one another. It also ignored
the reciprocal influence of the dependent variables, singly or in
concert, on the independent variable. In other words, in practice
it entailed focusing on one preferred variable as explanatory of the
various others; however, it failed to make explicit that the inde-
pendent factor accounted for only some, but not all, of the variance
in the dependent variables, and thus failed to take as problematic
the still unexplained or residual variance in the dependent vari-
ables. Essentially, the effort here was to “justify” some general
emphasis on the importance of a variable and to demonstrate that
it could be ignored only at the analyst’s peril. The researcher’s
interest here was only in the independent variable, and in legitimat-
ing its place in his theory.

The Multiple Causation Model: This model was one of the two
major reactions against the single factor model. In opposition to it,
multiple causation counteraffirmed that all social and cultural
phenomena were produced by many factors rather than one. Mul-
tiple causation focused on the diversity of contributors to the single
outcome, and it sought to identify the numerous independent
variables influencing the single event. While the single factor
model worked with one independent variable and many dependent

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 229

variables, the multiple causation model typically used many inde-
pendent variables and one dependent variable.

In this way, multiple causation lent greater “realism” to theory
and research. It congenially resonated the sentiments of the liberal
intellectual, who, as liberal, sought to mediate between competing
single-factor theories and who, as intellectual, was suspicious of
the oversimplification and partiality of any one of the single factor
theories. The defects of the multiple causation model were, how-
ever, substantial; indeed, they were the mirror image of those
manifested by the single factor model. Multiple causation entailed
the successive study of the effects of various independent variables,
taken one at a time, either with or without the effects of the other
independent variables held constant or “partialled out”; in either
case, it also neglected the reciprocal influence of the single de-
pendent variable on the independent variables.

Multiple causation commonly violated the canons of parsimony,
often tending to the needless proliferation of independent variables.
Sometimes, for example, it failed to consider whether the inde-
pendent variables it added actually provided a better accounting for
a greater proportion of the variance of the dependent variable. It
also, sometimes, ignored the possibility that the several independ-
ent variables were simply outward manifestations of a smaller
number of underlying common factors, or of one factor, being but
different measures of one and the same thing.

Parsonsian System Analysis: This, like multiple causation, was,
as I have suggested, also born, at least, in part, out of a polemic
against the single factor model. Parsons’ system model rejected the
single factor view that, within a given domain, there was some
variable that was inherently an independent one; it looked upon
all variables as being both dependent and independent. In this
respect it also broke with multiple causationism, for the latter had
also continued to use a distinction between dependent and inde-
pendent variables, even if it did not regard any specific variable as
being inherently one or the other. Parsons’ system model conceived
of human groups as systems composed of parts that were all inter-
dependent and mutually influential; it viewed each variable as both
"cause” and “effect.” As I have already indicated, a basic defect of
Parsons' system model is that it begs the question of whether all
the variables in a system are equally influential in determining the
state of the system as a whole or the condition of any of its parts.

The difference between Parsons’ system model and the single
factor model, if we construe Marxism as an example of the latter,
is not so radical as Parsons seems to imply, at least in his polemical
formulations that stress their discontinuity. This is so for at least

230 The World of Talcott Parsons

two reasons. First, it is unmistakably clear that Marx did think of
societies as social systems whose elements mutually influence one
another. Marx did, after all, invent the concept of the “capitalist
system.” In fact, he believed that even the “superstructure” does
react back upon the “infrastructure,” though he felt that the latter
is, in the “long run,” controlling. Marx accepted the systemness of
human groups as given; his attention was fixed on asserting that
certain elements within the system ultimately controlled it. In
effect, Marx addressed himself to the question of the weighting of
the system parts, but he did so under circumstances where the
opportunity for a mathematical solution was still far off; he thus
did not give his solution a mathematical formulation and did not
focus on the degree of control or dominance that a factor could
have, any more than Parsons focused on the degree of interdepend-
ence among variables.

There is a second reason that Marxism and the Paxsonsian sys-
tem model are not as discontinuous as they might seem. While
Parsons’ system model affirms an amorphous interdependence
among system parts, without weighting or formally affirming the
dominance of any one part, nonetheless, he — like others in his
theoretical tradition, from Comte to Durkheim — has always clearly
assigned a very special place to one variable.- shared moral beliefs
or value elements. Parsons’ actual use of the system model is not
so radically different from Marx’s. The concrete variable to which
each assigns special importance is, admittedly, very different, and
Marx does it all much more overtly than Parsons; nonetheless,
each does, in practice, assign special importance to “one” variable
operating within the system of mutually interacting variables. On
this level, the differences between the Functionalist and the Marxist
traditions are much more, though not entirely, a substantive mat-
ter of the specific variable preferred, rather than a matter of the
formal explanatory model that each uses.

A possible basis for integrating the two traditions can be realized
by formulating a fourth model, which I have called a “stratified
system model.” This model would methodically note that, even
within a system of interdependent parts, not all elements are
equally interdependent, some having a greater, and others a lesser,
degree of autonomy or independence. In designating this a “strati-
fied” system model, the intention is not to emphasize the causal
potency of social stratification, but rather to focus attention on the
differential causal influence of the numerous variables that operate
together in a system. The model postulates that the variables com-
prising a system will be stratified in terms of their differential
influence.

The stratified system model shares with both the Parsonsian sys-

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 231

tem model and Marxism an interest in viewing any socio-cultural
pattern as an element in a system. Unlike both these other models,
however, it seeks, on the one hand, to measure the extent to which
this pattern is involved in a given system and, on the other, to
measure the extent to which the latter is a system. Unlike the
Parsonsian system model, the stratified system model aims to de-
termine the extent to which various components of the system
may account for its characteristics, and to weight their varying
influences. Unlike the Marxist model, the stratified system model
insists on leaving open the possibility that more than one factor
may determine the system’s characteristics and insists that these
others be investigated and their relative influence measured: it does
this without assuming that several influencing factors will all be
equally influential, and without ignoring, as does the Parsonsian
model, the question of their differing degrees of influence.

EQUILIBRIUM PROBLEMS

Basic to Parsons’ analysis of the social system is his focus on
equilibrium and on the conditions from which this derives. For
Parsons, what makes Ego and Alter a system is not simply that
their behavior is mutually influential or interdependent, but that it
contains patterns that tend to be maintained. It is not simply that
there are regularities, features predictable in their behavior toward
one another, for these could be regularities of conflict and change;
Parsons focuses on the manner in which these patterns are either
protected from change and conflict or, if they undergo it, do so
only within a repetitive cycle. In focusing on social system equilib-
rium, Parsons’ concern is with the manner in which patterns of
interaction are stabilized and unchanged, or on how, when some
changes do occur, still others will result whose effect is to limit the
first changes or return the situation to what it had been. He is
concerned with the w T ay social systems are endowed with sclf-
maintaining elements, with stabilizing characteristics internal to
the system. In short, emphasis is on how the system preserves
itself; a system has no inherent strains, only situational discrep-
ancies or “disturbing” factors of marginal significance.

More concretely and in Parsons’ terms, it is held that a social
system is and will remain in equilibrium to the extent that Ego
and Alter conform with one another's expectations. The equilibrium

232 The World of Talcott Parsons

of the system is seen as, in effect, largely dependent on the con-
forming behavior of group members. Insofar as Ego does what
Alter expects, Alter will be gratified by this and will, in turn, be-
have so that Ego is gratified, which is to say, in conformity with
Ego’s expectations; thus, when one behaves in conformity with
another’s expectations, he elicits a response from the other that
leads him to continue doing so without any change.

This model makes a variety of tacit empirical assumptions. Most
particularly, it assumes that each of a sequence of identical con-
forming acts will yield either the same or an increasing degree of
appreciation, satisfaction, or gratification, and will thereby so re-
ward the conformer as to continue them. This assumption seems to
be involved in Parsons’ conception of how social system equilibrium
is maintained, for, otherwise, it is difficult to understand how he
can hold that "the complementarity of role-expectations, once
established, is not problematical. . . . No special mechanisms are
required for the explanation of the maintenance of complementary
interaction-orientation.'”' In other words, once started, this cycle of
mutual conformity goes on indefinitely. Now, so far as I am aware,
no evidence exists for what this implies, namely, that responses
which reward a series of identical conforming actions will either
remain the same or increase. On the contrary, both impressionistic
observations and theoretical considerations lead one to have the
greatest doubt about it.

DECLINING MARGINAL UTILITY OF CONFORMITY 10

Here, as in the previous discussion of system "interdependence,”
the subject is best viewed as involving questions of degree: Ego’s
conforming acts always have some consequences for Alters expec-
tations; expectations are always modified by prior relevant action.
But, modified in what manner and to what degree? For my part, I
would assume that the longer the unbroken sequence of Ego’s
conforming actions goes on, the more likely is it that Alter will take
Ego’s later actions for granted and the less likely is it that they will
be given notice.

This, in turn, will elicit tendencies for Ego either to reduce or
to increase the extent of his conformity with Alter’s expectations.
If he reduces them, this may, in turn, lead Alter to reduce his
conformity with Ego’s expectations still further, and thus generate

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 233

a vicious cycle of decreasing mutual gratification and conformity,
and thereby of growing tension. Conceivably, however, Ego may
seek to maintain his former level of gratifications received from
Alter by increasing his conformity with Alter’s expectations, thus
seeking to prevent Alter’s rewards from declining. This, however,
means that Ego's conforming behavior is undergoing an inflation-
ary spiral, later units of conformity being worth less than earlier
ones. But, how long can Ego go on increasing his conformity
under these conditions? One limit is, of course, set by the sheer
extent of Ego’s energies, time, and resources. He cannot increase
his conformity indefinitely in order to maintain his own former
level of gratifications. Moreover, Ego’s cost in maintaining such
conformity will increase relative to his gains, and thus alternative
investments of his time and resources will become increasingly at-
tractive and/or rewarding. In short, the probability of the con-
tinuance of this line of conduct, or even of the relationship itself,
is declining under these conditions.

It is, of course, possible that as Alter’s rewards to Ego decline
and Ego reduces or halts his conformity with Alter’s expectations,
Alter will stop taking Ego’s conformity for “granted” and will in-
crease the rewards he gives Ego for it. But, in any event, it seems
clear that it cannot simply be assumed, as Parsons does, that identi-
cal acts of conformity will yield identical increments in group
equilibrium. At some point, continued and unchanging conformity
exerts strains upon a social system, inducing apathy, or tensions
and conflict. Insofar as this leads to Ego’s failure to comply with
Alter’s expectations, or to reduce his conformity with them, this
may recharge the whole equilibrium process. But this is a far cry
from the original conception, which stressed that it was con-
formity with expectations upon which system equilibrium primarily
depended.

Parsons’ own assumptions therefore lead to the conclusion that
system equilibrium requires some nonconformity with expecta-
tions. Moreover, even in Parsons’ terms, it appears as if the system
does indeed contain its own “seeds of destruction,” for, at some
point, continued conformity produces system disequilibrium. The
system disrupts itself. What Parsons fails to see is that considera-
tions of marginal utility apply to the gratifications produced by con-
forming actions. Conformity, in short, has an economic dimension,
and its “price” or return is subject to considerations of the amount
of the supply and demand. Conformity’ always tends to “glut" the
market; it can thereby generate nonconformity. The stability of a
social system may thus be impaired by conformity, while it may
be restored or renewed by dissent and nonconformity.

234

The World of Talcott Parsons

CONSTRAINT AND THE PRICE OF CONFORMITY 11

Considerations other than the sheer amount or repetition of con-
forming actions can likewise strengthen the expectation of con-
formity, and thus similarly reduce the return — the “appreciation”
and counterconformity — it elicits. Central among these is the de-
gree to which Alter defines Ego’s conforming actions as imposed
upon him : “he was forced to do it.” The more that Alter feels this,
the less will he value the actions and reciprocate them; conversely,
the more that Alter defines Ego’s conformity as “voluntary,” given
“of his own free will,” the greater is his tendency to reward it.

There are two types of conditions under which Alter may feel
that Ego’s conformity is involuntary or constrained. First, he may
feel Ego’s conformity is situationally constrained, that he “has no
choice” and conforms out of expedience, in order to get what he
wants or to reduce his own costs. Second, Alter may feel that Ego’s
conformity is morally constrained, that Ego has no choice but to
conform because nonconformity would be so morally reprehensible.

To understand some of the larger implications of this we must
go back to certain basic elements in Parsons’ account of the Ego-
Alter system and to his explanation of its equilibrium. From Par-
sons’ standpoint Ego and Alter will more likely conform with one
another’s expectations when they share a common moral code, for
this means that each has developed expectations that the other
regards as legitimate and deserving of conformity. Parsons expects
a common moral code to stabilize relationships, and he focuses on
the ways in which it does so. He assumes that the more an expecta-
tion is defined as legitimate and is sanctioned by Ego’s and Alter’s
common moral code, the more likely is it to be given conformity;
thus he sees a moral code as stabilizing and system-equilibrating.
What this ignores, however, is that, while a shared moral code may
increase Ego’s disposition to conform with Alter’s expectations,
nonetheless, to the extent that Alter defines Ego’s conformity as
imposed upon him by this moral code, Alter will tend to reward
such conformity less than he will the similar act of another, which
he defines as having been not morally imposed but as given volun-
tarily.

In other words, while a shared moral code may increase Ego’s
motivation to conform with Alter’s expectations, it may, however,
reduce the reward or return that Alter gives Ego for conformity.
And this will be the more pronounced as Ego’s conformity is made

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 235

more reliable by his acceptance of this moral code. A shared moral
code thus seems to increase the probability that conformity will be
rewarded, but to reduce the amount of the reward given.

What Parsons generally fails to communicate is the system of
tensions that are expressed in and maintained by a moral code. In
part, this results from the fact that he makes no genera] analysis
of the conditions under which moral codes develop or of the func-
tions they perform, beyond merely indicating that they serve to
harmonize Ego and Alter by establishing a complementarity of
social interaction. But, why should any kind of moral code be
necessary, except that one party wants something from another
whom he sees as unwilling to provide it? If he were seen merely as
unable to provide such compliance, the response would simply in-
volve an effort to educate him to do so, by increasing his skills or
his knowledge, but would not involve defining the desired perform-
ance as morally obligatory.

If we postulate — and I will develop this more fully at a later
point — that desired performances are defined as morally obligatory
when people are seen as able but unwilling to perform them, then
the very existence of a moral norm premises a tensionful conflict
of forces: there is a desire for some action and, counter to this,
there is some measure of reluctance to perform it. One need not at
all postulate that, say, by their “animal nature" men chafe against
moral restrictions. The point is simply that the moral imperative
would be unnecessary were there not some contrary impulse. Con-
formity with a moral norm is thus always a “duty” which is in some
degree costly and, for that reason, is contingent. This is precisely
why the rewards given by others are of special importance in main-
taining morally stipulated actions.

Conformity given by Ego is, as I have said, likely to earn only
restricted rewards, to the extent that Ego’s behavior is defined by
Alter as imposed upon him by the moral norms. At the same time,
if Alter is also bound by the same moral norm, it obliges him to
make an appropriate response and to provide some reward for Ego’s
compliance. Alter too is caught in a tension between opposing im-
pulses. It is not only Ego’s conformity with the moral norm, but
Alter’s response as well, that is highly contingent. The conformity
that each gives to the moral norm is precarious, because for each
of them it rests on a conflict of internal forces; it is doubly pre-
carious, because its maintenance depends on overcoming the con-
flict of forces within each and also on the external rewards that
each provides for the other by his own precarious conformity.
Conformity and system equilibrium are thus far more uncertain,
vulnerable, and precarious in the “normal” case than Parsons inti-
mates.

236 The World of Talcott Parsons

Indeed, a system of social interaction is in part held together by
this tensionful uncertainty. Ego is, in part, oriented to being mind-
ful of and sensitive to Alters expectations and behavior because
Ego is far from certain how he himself should behave and precisely
because he is far from totally submissive to the moral norms. If
Ego were totally under the influence of internalized moral norms
he might pay little or no attention to the implications of his own
behavior for Alter; he might simply do as the norms required. And
if Ego paid no heed to the consequences for Alter but only to his
own piety, then the damage would really be done, for no social
system could long survive with men so moral that they took no
heed of one another’s needs and responses. In sum, it is not the
completely successful but rather the precarious internalization of
moral norms and the ambivalent conformity to them upon which
the survival of social systems depends. Insofar as the system is held
together, it is held together not despite but by its tensions.

The equilibrium of the system is maintained, so far as it is , not
simply because Ego’s gratifications derive from Alter’s responses
and vice versa, and not simply because each is thus led to conform
with the other’s expectations in order to secure gratification of his
own. Parsons does see this aspect. What he misses is that it is not
merely the mutual dependence, but also the sheer uncertainty of
the gratification that each provides for and receives from the other
that also holds the system together; and this, in turn, depends
partly on the resistance that each has to conformity with their
shared moral code. What he continually misses is that the equilib-
rium of the system is, in part at least, dependent upon the umvill-
ingness of those in it to conform with the moral code, and thus
upon their tendencies toward nonconformity.

SCARCITY AND SUPPLY OF GRATIFICATIONS

As we have seen, Parsons stresses that the stability of social sys-
tems derives largely from the conformity of role partners to one
another’s expectations. Presumably, the more people pay their
social debts, the more stable the social system. What this ignores
is that it is not simply the payment of a social debt but the exist-
ence of debts still unpaid, acknowledged “outstanding obligations,”
that contributes to the stability of the social system. It is obviously
inexpedient for creditors to sever relationships with those who

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 23-

still have and acknowledge obligations to them. And it is also in-
expedient for debtors to do so, if onlv because creditors mav not
again allow them to run up a bill of indebtedness. If this conclusion
is correct, then we should not only focus on mechanisms that con-
strain men to pay their debts, as Parsons does, but should as well
search out social mechanisms that induce people to remain socially
indebted to one another, that inhibit their complete repayment,
and that conceal or obscure the net balance of reciprocities among
them.

Parsons acknowledges, to turn to a related but different con-
sideration. that the stability of a social svstem requires that there
may be some “mutuality of gratification" among tire system's mem-
bers. In other words, he acknowledges that system stability de-
pends. in part, on the exchange of gratifications, those provided bv
one part}' being contingent on those provided by the other. This,
however, remains a fragmentary insight whose full implications
remain unexplored in Parsons' work. Here again it is necessary to
raise questions of degree and amount, in this case of tire amount
of gratification that the system supplies its members and of the
amount of mutuality that exists. Both of these may and do vary.

To take the question of the amount of gratification first: Parsons’
Ego and Alter do not seem to live in a world of scarcity; scarcity
seems to have no effect on their behavior or on their relationship.
Typically, Parsons calculates the stability of a social system in
terms of the relationship between men’s moral expectations and the
conformin' given them bv others; that is. in terms of the isomor-
phism between men’s performances and their moral code. Parsons
assumes men will learn to derive gratification from such conform-
in' and. because their capacin' for gratification is extremely mal-
leable. thev will learn to accept different amounts and kinds of
gratifications. Thus variations in the level of gratification is not
problematic, for Parsons. What he is implicitly doing is simply
holding constant the level of gratification, because he wishes to
stress the other point, namelv. the importance of conformity with a
shared moral code. Thus the centri locus of strain in Parsons'
social svstem is “deviance - — lack of conformity with moral norms
— but not lack of gratification. In contrast, a full focus on the
implications of gratification for social system stability would entail
concern with the degree or level of gratification, with deprivation
and relative deprivation.

Parsons is undoubtedly correct in indicating that variations in
the degree of moral conformity with a system have an effect on its
stability. Yet This savs no more than that moral conformity makes
some independent contribution to system stability. It fails, however,
to assess the contribution that mav be made bv sheer gratification.

v The World of Talcott Parsons

by gratification independent of morality. Parsons tends to reduce
gratifications to those derivable from conformity and to emphasize
that conformity usually brings gratification. Like Plato, he prefers
to believe that the good man is also the happy one. It is easy to
understand how a moralist is disposed to claim this, but difficult
to understand that anyone describing the world could do so.

Fortunately for them, men can often find gratification in non-
moral things, and, often enough, they find gratification in things
downright immoral. Parsons’ primary emphasis, however, is on the
convergence — one might say, the happy coincidence — of morality
and gratification: “The normal actor is, to a significant degree, an
‘integrated’ personality . . . the things he values morally are also the
things he ‘desires’ as sources of hedonic satisfaction or objects of
affection .” 12 This alleged coincidence of wants and moral values is
nothing less than startling in the light of all the cumulative evi-
dence of clinical psychology, let alone everyday observation. In
contrast to Parsons, Somerset Maugham seems ruthlessly realistic:
Parsons, happy man, knows nothing of “Human Bondage.”

In all this, Parsons is once again making the world whole. He
does so either through a conceptual fantasy that obliterates con-
flicts and contradictions, or by deprecating their significance while
acknowledging their existence in a merely formal and empty way
that undermines their reality. Characteristically, Parsons thus adds
to the above quotation the routine qualification that, “to be sure,
there are, concretely, often serious conflicts in this respect, but
they must be regarded mainly as instances of ‘deviation’ from the
integrated type .” 12 To be sure.

In emphasizing the coincidence between what men want and
what they value. Parsons fails to see sheer gratification as a fully
independent standard by which human action is guided and which
is not only distinct from but often knowingly at variance with the
claims of morality. On the one hand, there is a standard of gratifi-
cational adequacy, by which we appraise people and things in
terms of the enjoyment they provide us and, on the other, there is
the standard of moral propriety — which is one source, but scarcely
exhausts the sources, of gratification — by which we appraise the
conformity of things and people with our conceptions of the way
they should be. There are, therefore, some thinpnhty do because
we deem them morally obligatory though; ri^f role p& T , ungratify-
ing — for example, visiting a kinsman whom weirgoilke — and others
we do because they are gratifying even though morally improper.
Here the list of exemplifying possibilities staggers the imagination.

This distinction is important for many reasons, not the least of
which is that men will openly complain of and seek public redress
for offenses to their moral standards, while covertly and very per-

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 239

sistently seeking remedies for those impairments of gratification
that violate no moral standards. In the latter case, the resultant
problems simply fester underground, and efforts at remedy, for a
while anyway, take the form of guerrilla forays rather than open
warfare. But the response to the lack of gratification is just as real
and consequential as, even if different in form than, the response
to a violation of the moral code.

We would assume, therefore, that two social systems that were
alike in all other ways, but differed in respect to the amount of
gratification each supplied its members — relative to their costs of
involvement, on the one hand, and relative to their needs, on the
other — would also come to differ in their stability. In short, social
systems that supplied their members with more gratifications
would also be more stable. Again, suppose that with two identical
social systems we were to increase the amount of gratifications that
one provided its members and decrease that of the other. Is it not
very unlikely that the stability of the two systems would remain
unchanged or that they would change in the same direction?

Parsons seems to assume that the scarcity or level of gratifica-
tions as such will not effect system stability, so long as Ego and
Alter share a common moral code. Presumably, the common code
will lead to complementary rights and obligations: Ego will want
no more gratifications from Alter than Alter willingly provides. But
the gratifications that Alter is willing to provide Ego depend not
only on Alters conception of his duty but also on the costs of his
performing it; these costs effect the supply of the gratification
Alter provides and, in turn, depend upon the supply available to
him. Any party’s conformity with his moral obligations is a func-
tion of the level, the scarcity or abundance, of his own gratifica-
tions, and of the cost of producing them.

RECIPROCITY, COMPLEMENTARITY , AND EXPLOITATION

Once posed quantitatively, it becomes apparent that “mutuality of
gratification” is not something that is merely present or absent. It
is not an “all or none” matter. Benefits exchanged may, at one
extreme, be identical or equal. At the other logical extreme, one
party may give the other nothing in return for the benefits he has
received. Both of these extremes are probably rare in social rela-
tions, and the intermediary case, in which one party gives the other

24° The World of Talcott Parsons

something more or less than he has received, is probably far more
common than either limiting case.

It is not simply “mutuality” but, very vitally, the degree of mu-
tuality that affects the equilibrium of a social system. While it need
not be supposed that an equality of exchanged gratifications is
necessary for system equilibrium, it is, nonetheless, clear that as
the exchange becomes more and more one-sided, the relations be-
come more precarious. In consequence, an understanding of system
disequilibrium requires us to pay particular attention to “exploita-
tive” relations, those in which one party gives more or less than he
receives in return.

Although exploitative relations imperil system equilibrium, they
cannot, however, be assumed not to occur. Rather, what needs to
be explored are the conditions under which they do occur, and how
social systems are held together despite their occurrence. In Par-
sons’ work on the doctor-patient relationship, he tacitly acknowl-
edges the importance of exploitation by noting the unique ex-
ploitability of the patient, but he tends to see this as a special case;
the point, however, should be to recognize medical exploitation as
but one case in a larger class of social phenomena of basic sig-
nificance to theory, rather than giving it only ad hoc treatment in a
few empirical contexts.

Parsons’ failure systematically to analyze exploitative patterns
and even to see their general importance is partly related to his
failure to explore the variability possible in the degree of mutuality
of gratification. Another reason for this failure is that much of
Parsons’ analysis of system equilibrium focuses on the comple-
mentarity of expectations, though in fact he tends to confuse
complementarity and reciprocity. Parsons sometimes uses these
two terms as if they are synonymouS; he centers his own analysis
far more firmly on complementarity and neglects systematic analy-
sis of reciprocity, rigorously construed.

Now, complementarity has essentially two meanings: it means,
first, that what Ego defines as his right is defined as an obligation
by Alter, and, second, that what Alter defines as his duty' is viewed
by Ego as his right. On the empirical level, however, it is possible
for one party to conceive himself as having either a right or a duty,
though the other does not define his own situation in a comple-
mentary manner, entailing a complementary duty or right. What
should produce the complementarity, indicates Parsons, is that
both share the same set of moral values. In any empirical case,
complementarity means that what is a right of Ego is actually felt
by Alter to be his duty.

Reciprocity, however, as distinct from complementarity, implies
that each party receives something from the other in return for

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 241

•what he has given him. In terms of rights and obligations, this
means that reciprocity entails not that one party’s rights are the
other’s obligations, but rather that each party has both rights and
obligations, thus increasing the probability that there •will be some
exchange of gratifications. In effect, then, reciprocity of gratifica-
tions requires that each role be defined culturally so as to include
both rights and obligations.

There are at least two general ways in which complementarity
as such can break down. In one. Alter can refuse to acknowledge
Ego’s rights as being his own duties. In the other. Ego may not
regard as his rights that which Alter regards as his own duties. Now
it is notable that Parsons gives scant attention to the latter. The
reason for ignoring it is obvious such a breakdown in comple-
mentarity is not frequent, nor, should it occur, would it have as
disruptive an impact on system equilibrium as the other kind of
breakdown; when men are endowed with more rights by others
than they themselves wish or claim, their relationship is less likely
to be disrupted than when they claim more than die others are
willing to acknowledge.

In reality, then, it is not a lack of complementarity as such — as
Parsons seems to think— that disrupts social systems, but rather
the lack of one type of complementarity. It is primarily when men
ask for more, not less — and when they give less, not more — than
others think their right, that trouble ensues. In noting the signifi-
cance that shared moral codes have for engendering a system-
equilibrating complementarity. Parsons tacitly assumes what Durk-
heim explicitly postulated, that the main function of moral values
is to restrain men’s wants and claims. Like Aristotle, Parsons tacitly
assumes that men are more ready to receive and claim benefits
than they are to give them. He is, in short, operating with a domain
assumption about human nature, although not explicating it:
namely, that men have a tendency toward “egoism,” a salient
though not exclusive concern with their own gratifications. If this
is a valid assumption — and some such assumption appears to be
eminently reasonable — then any complementarity of rights and
obligations that might be established should be exposed to a pat-
terned and systematic strain, for each party will usually be some-
what more alert and actively concerned to defend or extend his own
rights than those of others.

There is nothing in complementarity as such that would seem
able to control such egoism. Even if it is assumed that socialization
transmits a deeply internalized moral code (with its accompanying
conceptions of rights and obligations), there still remains a ques-
tion as to how this is sustained during the person’s full participa-
tion in the social system. How is complementarity maintained

242 The World of Talcott Parsons

within the context of social interaction? For this we need to look
to reciprocity, the process through which gratifications are ex-
changed. For reciprocity, unlike complementarity, actually mo-
bilizes egoistic motivations and channels them into the maintenance
of the social system. Egoism can motivate one party to satisfy the
expectations of the other, since by doing so he shall induce the
latter to reciprocate and satisfy his own. In fine, it is not comple-
mentarity by itself, but only when supported by reciprocity, that
can yield system stability.

EQUILIBRIUM AND POWER DISPARITIES

Since system stability depends upon the exchange of benefits and
is impaired by exploitation, then conditions abetting exploitation
must have adverse effects upon this stability. While various condi-
tions are conducive to exploitative exchange, none seem more
obvious to me, and less obvious to Parsons, than extensive power
differences among the system’s members. Where notable dispari-
ties in power exist, the stronger is enabled to coerce the weaker,
allowing him to extract gratification without providing appropriate
returns.

It is characteristic of Parsons’ analysis of social system equilib-
rium that he never clarifies his assumptions concerning the pow r er
balance conducive to a stable social system. Power is, in this regard,
simply taken as a given. His tacit assumption, therefore, must be
that the balance or imbalance of pow r er between Ego and Alter will
make no difference for the stability of their relationship, if the
other conditions obtain. It would seem, however, that such an
assumption is more than dubious — it is either naive or ideologically
compulsive. While Parsons assumes that moral values held in
common by Ego and Alter are conducive to the stability of their
relationship, he never seems to ask about the conditions under
w'hich moral values will be held in common; he never seems to
notice that pow'er differences (among others) are likely to be con-
ducive to differences in moral values and will thus, within his own
assumptions, undermine the stability of the relationship in which
they exist. Moreover, Parsons ignores the fact that such pow'er
differences establish a framework in w'hich one party can, and
often does, impose himself on another, with resultant conflict be-
tween them, even when they do share moral beliefs. Differential

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 243

power is thus conducive neither to a consensus in moral beliefs
and to an attendant complementarity of expectations, nor to a
reciprocity or "mutuality of gratifications.” On two counts, then,
great power differences will, by Parsons’ own assumptions, impair
the self-maintaining equilibrium with which he is concerned.

The point here, of course, is not that great power differences
necessarily impair system equilibrium because they inevitably lead
those with the power advantage to exploit their position selfishly.
The point is simply that this potentiality for system-disruption is
inherent in the nature of such a power difference. Parsons ac-
knowledges that some forms of power may be disruptive, or indeed
disintegrative, of social systems, while other forms are integrative.
However, the major distinction he makes concerns the form of
power, whether or not it is “controlled" or “uncontrolled” — the for-
mer resulting in integrative, the latter is disintegrative tendencies
— rather than the size of the disparities in power among system
members. Of course whether or not power is controlled, power dif-
ferences may still vary extensively: one may have “controlled”
totalitarian or authoritarian power, or one may have “controlled”
democratic power where the power differences are relatively small.
For Parsons, however, the extent of the power differences among
system members is not in itself significant for the stability of their
relationship. Presumably, the only way power effects system sta-
bility is through variations in the manner with which it is con-
trolled.

This seems to mean that differences in power are not conse-
quential for system stability so long as they are morally sanctioned
or “legitimate" — and hence constitute not power but "authority” —
for it is this that Parsons seems to mean when he speaks of the
“control” of power. Yet this misses the problem. For system sta-
bility the real issue is whether or not power disparities among
system members are consequential for the maintenance of the
mutuality of gratification and the complementarity of expectations.
To say that "controlled power” is system integrative begs the ques-
tion: Do great disparities in power among system members facili-
tate or impair the control of power? When Parsons says that power
may be controlled or uncontrolled, and that its consequences for
system stability vary with this, he means to stress that power is not
inherently disruptive (or corruptive). But since, for Parsons, power
is by definition the capacity to realize the system’s collective goals,
this simply boils down to the platitude that the capacity to realize
the system’s goals is not inherently disruptive. Whoever thought it
would be?

The problem, of course, is what the consequences are of using
power for private or for class rather than system goals; power is

244 The World of Talcott Parsons

simply not power if used in the way Parsons defines it, and the
issue disappears through conceptual magic. It is rather as if some-
one were to say, “Girls with ‘good looks’ have special advantages,”
and Parsons were to respond: “Forget about ‘good looks’; let’s only
talk about ‘looks,’ and remember, ‘looks’ are not inherently bad.”

Parsons’ focus is not primarily on the manner in which the
power of one actor may be controlled by the -power of another, but
rather on the restraints that are placed on men’s power by a moral
code. But, if a decisive consideration for system stability is the
control of power, this it would seem can be done in various ways,
moral restraints being only one of them. It should be obvious, but
apparently is not, that, if the aim is to control power, one should
prevent its distribution from becoming too one-sided. That Parsons
never takes this tack is related to his belief in the functional in-
dispensability of social stratification, for this implies that there
must be differences in status — in prestige, wealth, possessions,
facilities, and sanctions — and, therefore, differences in power.
Parsons simply believes that power differences are functionally
necessary and indispensable for social systems. Since he generally
assumes that social systems do not embody tendencies or processes
that are inherently tmstabilizing, he cannot recognize that great
power disparities are inherently unstabilizing.

Parsons’ concern, then, is with the moral control of power, which
is part of his more general focus on morally sanctioned social
patterns, or on patterns seen in their relations to moral beliefs. In
other words. Parsons’ central concern is with patterns of action and
social interaction that are culturally prescribed and institutional-
ized. His primary focus is on the legitimacy of behavior patterns,
on dimension of legitimacy rather than gratification. In effect.
Parsons divides the social world in two: behavior patterns that are
normatively prescribed, and those that are not. His work thus em-
bodies an implicit distinction between an “infrastructure” and a
“superstructure”; unlike the explicit Marxist distinction of a for-
mally similar sort, Parsons’ analysis emphasizes those culturally
prescribed moral elements that Marx would locate in the super-
structure.

n o.t e s

i. Compare my discussion of Plato’s dialogue form in my Enter Plato
(New York: Basic Books, 1965), pp. 379 ff.

2.. T. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied , revised
edition (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1957 ). PP- 4&-47-

3. See, for example, the excellent article by Max Black, in The Social

Parsons as a Systems Analyst 245

Theories of Talcott Parsons, M. Black, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1961), pp. 268-288.

4. This and the next section are more fully developed in my "Reciprocity
and Autonomy in Functional Theory,” in Symposium on Sociological Theory,
L. Gross, ed. (White Plains, N.Y.: Row, Peterson, and Co., 1959), pp. 241-
270.

5. Parts of this section and the next are developed in A. W. Gouldner and
R. A. Peterson, Notes cm Technology and the Moral Order (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1962). See Chapter 3, especially.

6. See T. Parsons, R. F. Bales et al.. Family, Socialization and Interaction
Process (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1955).

7. This can be clearly seen when Parsons revises and enlarges his earlier
work; for instance, compare his 1940 version of the theory of stratification
with that of 1953.

8. Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1951), p.

494-

g. Ibid., p. 205.

10. I have discussed this in detail in "Organizational Analysis,” Sociology
Today, R. K. Merton et al., eds. (New York: Basic Books, 1959), pp. 423 ff.

11. For a fuller analysis and argument see my "The Norm of Reciprocity:
A Preliminary Statement,” American Sociological Review, XXV (i960), 161-
179.

12. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied, p. 168.

13. Ibid.

CHAPTER

The Moralistics of
Talcott Parsons:
Religion, Piety, and the Quest
for Order in Functionalism

For Talcott Parsons the social world is, above all, a moral world,
and social reality is a moral reality. It is not what men actually do
that is most important to him; these are merely discrepancies,
secondary disturbances, erratic departures of some sort. Rather, it
is what the group values prescribe they do that constitutes the per-
spective from which their actual behavior is viewed. There is, thus,
a persistent pressure in Parsons’ work to ignore social regularities
that are not generated by moral codes. This, in turn, means that
regularities that derive largely from the competition for or conflict
over scarce goods and information, and which are not normatively
prescribed or derived (for example, processes of collective behavior
such as panics or crowds), tend to be neglected or seen as only
marginal.

LATENT IDENTITIES

When Parsons analyzes social systems, therefore, his focus is on
the way men’s behavior conforms to or deviates from the legiti-
mate expectations of others, and on the way it complies with the
requirements of those social statuses or identities that are defined as
relevant to the particular social system. This diverts attention from
those statuses that people occupy in other social systems and from

246

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 247

the other social identities with which they may be endowed. It thus
withdraws attention from the way such latent identities themselves
intrude upon and influence men’s behavior toward one another.

For example, there is usually something going on between people
by reason of their sexual interests and identities, even when this
is not prescribed by the moral values deemed relevant to the par-
ticular social system in which they axe interacting, or, indeed, by
the values of the larger society environing that specific social sys-
tem. Like most other social system analysts, Parsons takes little
note of the fact that Ego and Alter invariably have a gender, except
when he is talking about kinship: reproduction, si; sex, no! Yet,
one does not have to be a Freud to insist that sex makes a differ-
ence in the behavior of the members of a social system; so, too, do
identities of an ethnic, racial, or religious character, even though
not normatively prescribed by the particular social system. In con-
sequence of his general stress on institutionalized patterns of be-
havior, Parsons is led to focus his analysis on those manifest social
identities of system members that are consensually regarded as
legitimate in a situation, and to neglect those latent identities that
are not. But latent identities do, of course, systematically shape
behavior and social interaction. In particular, they exert a per-
sistent strain on social system stability. They continually dispose
people to behave in patterned ways which are at variance with or
irrelevant to the normative requirements of their specific social
system.

Parsons’ neglect of latent identities is merely one expression of
his moralistics, that is, of the dominant place that he ascribes to
patterns of moral values. In this, however, he is far from idiosyn-
cratic among American sociologists; whether because of Parsons’
influence on them, or of their common exposure to larger social
forces or to common intellectual paradigms, most American
sociologists stress the importance of moral values, particularly as
the source of social solidarity. One thing seems certain: the actual
evidence for this assumption is considerably less than the over-
whelming consensus of American sociologists concerning it would
lead one to believe.

That “Functionalists,” in particular, place unusual emphasis
upon the importance of moral beliefs may be documented, in some
part, by the findings of the national survey of American sociologists
that Timothy Sprehe and I conducted in 1964. In this survey we
sought, among other things, to determine their attitudes toward
Functionalism by asking them to respond to this statement: “Func-
tional analysis and theory still retain great value for contemporary
sociology.” We also asked for a response to the following statement:
‘The most basic sources of stability in any group are the beliefs and

248 The World of Talcott Parsons

values which its members share.” Responses to the first statement
were used to determine which sociologists were “favorable” or "un-
favorable” to Functionalism, and responses to the second were used
as an indicator of the importance that sociologists attributed to
shared moral beliefs. The finding was that sociologists “favorable”
to Functionalism were more likely than those “unfavorable” to stress
the importance of shared moral beliefs; specifically: eighty percent
of those favorable to Functionalism, but only sixty-four percent of
those unfavorable, agreed with the statement attributing impor-
tance to shared moral beliefs . 1

There would seem to be something of a paradox here: Why
should Functional Sociology, which, after all. came to maturity in
an advanced industrial civilization, consistently attribute such im-
portance to moral conditions? Why should it emphasize the effect
on social order made by morality rather than that made by techno-
logically-produced abundance and gratification?

In this chapter, I shall suggest that the moralistic character of
Parsons’ theory, which tends to be shared by all those generally
congenial to Functional theory, is related to the intellectual tradi-
tion from which it derives and, in particular, to certain of its
residual dilemmas, as evidenced in Durkheim’s early version of
Functionalism; that it is related to the fascination with the problem
of social order common to Functionalist Sociologists; that it is re-
lated, also, to the importance they ascribe to religion, with its
distinctive kind of shared moral values, as a source of social soli-
darity. These considerations largely bear on cognitive consistencies,
consistencies of theory and ideology. I shall further locate the
moralistics of Functionalism in certain broad social and historical
conditions, seeing it as responsive to certain dilemmas found in any
kind of social system and, more specifically, as responsive to the
forms they take in modern industrial society. I shall begin by ex-
amining aspects of the theoretical tradition, the internal subculture,
of Functionalism.

THE DUliKHEIMIAN DILEMMA

The stress on moral values in Functionalism is associated with its
emphasis upon the problem of social order and, in particular , upon
certain conceptions of social order and upon certain assumptions
concerning its maintenance. The tradition from which Functional-

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 249

ism most directly emerged was epitomized by Durkheim, who as-
sumed that, unless men’s wants were morally limited, no techno-
logical development, however advanced, could satisfy them and
thereby stabilize society. Durkheim, indeed, indicated that tech-
nology might increase appetites, and Comte had feared it might
generate a dissensus in beliefs, thus further attenuating social
order. Technological development, then, was seen neither as a
sufficient nor as a necessary condition of social stability, in this
tradition.

It was, on the other hand, explicitly assumed that shared moral
values were a necessary condition for the stability of any society.
Indeed, it was tacitly assumed that, given shared moral values in a
society, a low level of technology and material scarcity need not be
unstabilizing. Thus, it made no difference for its stability whether
a society had a highly productive technology, or whether it was
industrial or pre-industrial. It was the state of the morality, not
of the technology, that counted most for social order, from the
standpoint of those immersed in this tradition.

Furthermore, shared values were associated with the spontaneity
with which order was maintained. What was wanted was a spon-
taneous, self-maintaining social order that, deriving from men’s
possession of shared values, would facilitate their willing coopera-
tion and their readiness to do their duty. Technology and science,
on the other hand, were construed as deliberate rather than spon-
taneous devices to achieve social order and, thus, as intrinsically
unsuitable.

Functionalism differed from Positivism by rejecting the latter’s
evolutionism and, with this, its slogan of “Order and Progress.” In
separating itself from Positivism, Functionalism relinquished an
interest in "progress," which the Positivists had commonly associ-
ated with technology, the application of science to industry. The
Positivistic theory of cultural lag had intrinsically premised an evo-
lutionary progress spurred by technological advance. The three —
evolution, progress, and technology — tended to be associated in
Positivism. Functionalism, however, tended to deny the stability-
inducing significance attributable to the gratifications that an ad-
vanced technology might provide, while it simultaneously brought
itself to a narrower concentration on the problem of social order
alone. The problem of social order, therefore, had to be solved in-
creasingly in terms of the moral mechanisms on which Comte had
placed such reliance.

The initial problem with which we began can be divided into
two questions: first, why did Functionalism continue to focus on
moral values as a source of social order and, second, how did
Functionalism come to reject the Positivistic focus on technological

250 The World of Talcott Parsons

progress? The key figure here is Durkheim and the problem he
encountered in his critique of Comte. Durkheim’s polemic against
Comte’s argument that the division of labor induced dissensus in
social beliefs, had brought him to a critique of private property. 2
Durkheim held that it was not the division of labor as such, but
only the forced division that undermined social solidarity; this
division of labor was “pathological'’ because it was controlled by
outmoded institutions, particularly private property. At the same
time, however, Durkheim also held that social solidarity was im-
paired by the lack of a set of moral beliefs adequate to integrate
the new specializations — in short, by industrial anomie. He then
faced the strategic decision of which of these two impairments of
modern social order he would analyze further.

For various reasons, but mainly because it would bring him into
an uncomfortable convergence with the socialists, Durkheim
backed away from the problem of the forced division of labor and,
instead, concentrated on anomie; which is to say, on the moral
conditions necessary for social order. If Durkheim had followed up
his own lead on the forced division of labor, it would have blurred
the very difference between Academic Sociology and socialism on
which he was then polemically insisting; it would have been
difficult to tell the difference between Durkheim and Jaures. If
modern Functionalism had pursued Durkheim’s critique of the
forced division of labor, it too would have had to move toward some
form of socialism, and thus reject the master institutions of its
society. If Durkheim and modern Functionalism had accepted
Comte’s critique of the dissensus-producing effects of the division
of labor, it would have had to reject any form of industrialization.
Functionalism did none of these. Its solution was to say, in effect,
that the problem of social order could be solved apart from ques-
tions of economic institutions and technological levels. The prob-
lem could, that is, somehow be solved solely in terms of morality
as such, and thus would not require basic changes in industrializa-
tion or in its capitalist structure.

This seems to be part of the historical process by which the
Functionalists came to place special reliance on the role of moral
values in maintaining social order in industrial societies. Had it
followed Durkheim’s lead concerning the "forced” division of labor,
it would have been led to an analysis of property institutions predi-
cated upon assumptions critical of them. In turning away from this
problem and its obvious solution. Functionalism was constrained-
given the alternatives it saw — to place an ever greater reliance
upon moral values and moral reform as the source of social order.
Its focus upon the problem of order and its search for solutions to
it, became, in effect, a search for solutions to the problem of order

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 251

within a business-managed industrialism, for solutions that were
compatible with this distinctive kind of social order. Functional-
ism’s emphasis upon morality, as the keystone of social order, is
characterized by its compatibility with the maintenance of the
specific and established form of industrialism in which it found
itself, and which permitted it to avoid a critical posture toward its
society’s hegemonic institutions and classes.

FUNCTIONALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF ORDER

The deepest expression of Functionalism’s, as of any social theory’s,
conservatism is in its fascination with the problem of social order.
What is it that social theorists are doing when they focus upon
social order, either as their central intellectual problem or as their
central moral value? What is it that they seek when they seek
social order?

To seek order is to seek a reduction of social conflict, and thus
it is to seek a moratorium on such social changes as it sought
through conflict or which may engender it. To seek order is to seek
a predictability of behavior that would, of its nature, be threatened
either by social conflict or, for that matter, by individual creativity.
To seek social order is to seek order-giving mechanisms that might
derandomize behavior. It is to seek “social structures,” things that,
like rocks jutting into the stream of moving behavior, distribute it
in patterned ways or dam it up. This requires that some things be
viewed and treated as unchangeable. It expresses an Apollonian
vision of a social, world composed of firmly boundaried social ob-
jects, each demarcated and separated from and setting limits upon
the other. The quest for social order expresses an impulse to fix
and bind things down from a place outside of, if not above, them.
To seek or prefer order is to seek or prefer “structures”: the struc-
ture of social action, not the process.

For all the earnest talk about morality, however, the pursuit of
order is only contingently compatible with an emphasis upon moral
values; the commitment of those obsessed with order is not to
morality as such, but only to a moral system that yields order. Both
Positivism and Functionalism are really interested only in certain
kinds of shared moral beliefs, namely, those thought to produce
order. Positivism tended to assume that shared moral values that
did not produce order were, somehow, not “really” moral values.

252 The World of Talcott Parsons

For instance, when Comte spoke of individual “liberty of con-
science,” he was clearly referring to a kind of moral value, but,
despite this, he decried it because it led men to differing conclu-
sions and thereby dissolved social consensus. For the classical
Positivist, the truly moral was judged by its consequence, its con-
tribution to consensus; it was as difficult for him as for Durkheim
to resist the conclusion that anything that produced consensus,
restraint, and order was intrinsically moral. Order, in short, be-
comes the fundamental basis in terms of which the moral itself is
conceived.

The overt commitment to social order is a tacit commitment to
resist any change that threatens the order of the status quo, even
when that change is sought in the name of the highest values:
freedom, equality, justice. For this reason it is not uncommon for
social movements and elites that champion social order to betray
even the “superior” morality they claim to embody. A stress on
social order requires those committed to it to harden themselves
against the claims of other high values. Those who seek these other
values are, at bottom, often searching for an improvement in their
own life chances, their own access to scarce goods and dignities.
The demand for the fulfillment of such values commonly expresses
the protest of those who want a better life for themselves and more
of those things upon which this depends. It is thus threatening to
those who are already advantaged, for they fear that it means that
they will have, or be, less.

But since the demand for a reallocation of life chances is made
in the name of high values, to resist it nakedly and only in the
name of maintaining established privilege is to make oneself vul-
nerable. The advantaged universally tend to resist it, therefore, in
the name of what they claim to be a still higher value: social order.
To pursue and to speak in the name of social order, then, is to
defend, not order and not the status quo “in general,” but the
existent order with its specific and differential distribution of life
chances, which endows some with special advantages and others
with special liabilities.

The exponent of order presents the issue as if it were a choice
between “order” and “disorder” (or “anarchy”), and thereby makes
it seem as if a preference for order is the only reasonable choice to
make. Actually, of course, those seeking a redistribution of life
chances are not seeking disorder but a new order. And their strug-
gle for a new order is intrinsically no more conducive to disorder
than are the efforts of those who resist the new order in the name
of “order.” Disorder does not stem from the search for a new order
as such, but is a symptom of the failure of the old order; a rising
“disorder” stems from the breakdown of an old order that is com-

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 253

pounded by the compulsive effort to resist the new. It takes two to
make disorder. To make social order one’s central concern, then, is
indeed to be conservative, and not merely in a metaphysical sense;
it is to be politically conservative.

A central concern with social order, therefore, underwrites a
concern to maintain those established master institutions that allo-
cate life chances. Correspondingly, a concern to maintain social
order through a reliance upon morality requires a distinctive kind
of morality, one that maintains the existent patterns of life chances
and the institutions through which they are' allocated. In this con-
nection it needs to be emphasized that, however much they talk of
morality, the champions of social order are not in favor of any and
all moral beliefs. For example, and as Comte indicated, they are
not in favor of values that individuate behavior or diversify belief.
Typically also, they are not in favor of "material” values. Yet to
want a car, a clean apartment, a job may be just as expressive of a
“moral value” as to want God. Nonetheless, what the champions of
order vaunt when they speak of values are not material but “spir-
itual” values, “transcendental,” “nonempirical” values. They prize
spiritual values such as temperance, wisdom, knowledge, goodness,
cooperation, or a trust and faith in the goodness of God: the quiet
values.

While freedom and equality are no less “spiritual” values than
goodness and temperance, they are, nonetheless, not those to
which the guardians of order refer when they speak of values. For,
freedom and equality may be taken to legitimate claims for the
redistribution of material goods, and thus threaten property insti-
tutions and the existent system of social stratification. This is why
an overriding quest for order involves a quest for values that are
not merely different from liberty and equality, but commonly are in
op-position to them. The affirmation of morality by the champions
of order, then, is not primarily an affirmation of spiritual values as
such, but only of those values which, eluding the premises of a
zero-sum game, are not fixed or scarce, but are available in un-
limited supply. “Spiritual” values have historically had this inter-
esting quality: a man may get more of them without taking any-
thing away from others. Spiritual values may thus be achieved
without threatening the structure of privilege. The search for order
is a tacit search for those specific social mechanisms which allow
retention of the existent and basic distribution of life chances, and
thus require no change in basic institutions.

Underlying the formal conception of "social order in general”
is a tacit, concrete image of a specific order with its fixed distribu-
tion of life chances. The quest for order is thus an ideology; it
congenially resonates sentiments that favor the preservation of

254 The World of Talcott Parsons

privilege. And it is a very persuasive one too, for it speaks on be-
half of an imputed common interest shared by the privileged and
disadvantaged alike, and it thereby presents itself as nonpartisan.
But it neglects to mention that, while the interest is a common one,
it is not, in the nature of the case, an equal one. Some gain or lose
more than others when order breaks down; that, in some part, is
why it does break down. A social theory that takes as its central
problem the maintenance of social order is thus more ideologically
congenial to those who have more to lose.

One might add, however, that the champions of order may just
as readily oppose changes that would increase the deprivation of
the less privileged, and may even seek to ameliorate their lot. In
other words, there seems to be a certain impartiality in their love
of order. In practice, the champions of order often counsel the dom-
inant elites to a policy of restraint: nothing too much. Or in a less
classical idiom: don’t make a pig of yourself. But this advice de-
rives from the fear that an elite’s efforts to increase its control or
extend its advantage will precipitate counterresistance by the less
advantaged and thus generate open, order-disrupting conflict. What
such counsel of moderation basically seeks is the preservation of
the status quo. It serves, in short, to protect the given system of
privileges and liabilities in its essential features. Such counsel,
then, is not impartial to the status quo. It is a policy of prudence
on its behalf.

RELIGION AND MORALITY IN FUNCTIONALISM

I have reviewed the manner in which Durkheim’s intellectual di-

lemmas led Functionalism to a great emphasis upon morality. Well

before Durkheim, however, from its birth in Positivism, the new
sociology was conceived of as a “moral science.” Indeed, it issued
almost immediately in a sociological religion of humanity. From
the very beginnings of sociology, moral and religious interests were
intimately interwoven. That this conjunction is still present in the
Functionalist tradition that culminates in Parsons’ work could not
be made plainer than by Shils, in his encomiums to religion and in
his insistence on its special importance for authority and tradition . I * 3
Shils may be right that, for some sociologists, God is dead; but his
very complaint reveals that Functionalists such as himself refuse
to allow Him to be interred quietly.

The Moralistics of Talcctt Parsons 255

The unique importance that Parsons attributes to religion in the
modern world is expressed in two ways. First, in the ■potency that
he ascribes to it in bringing into existence practically all of what
he takes to be modern culture and society, including its uniquely
powerful economy, technology, and science. Second, in the good-
ness that he attributes to it and its products, as substantiated by
the increasingly benign character of the world it fosters. In short,
Parsons here resolves the problem of the grotesqueness of life, the
split between morality and power, by affirming that it is increas-
ingly both powerful and good, and that both aspects have a com-
mon root in Christianity. There is no other single institution to
which Parsons attributes such potency and goodness: the Church
has been the rock and the light of modern civilization.

It was Christianity, Parsons holds, that transmitted ancient cul-
ture to the modern world; which, in its medieval synthesis, “pro-
duced a great society and culture” 4 ; and which, in its Protestant
synthesis, was the necessary condition of “the great civilizational
achievements of the seventeenth century” — without Protestantism,
these are “unthinkable.” 5 Parsons reminds us that Weber linked the
Protestant Ethic to the development of capitalism not by a “re-
moval of ethical restrictions,” but rather by a religious mobilization
of certain motivations, eventuating in “free enterprise.” 8

“The Christian Church developed for its own internal use,” ex-
plains Parsons, “a highly rationalized and codified body of norms
which underlay the legal structure of the whole subsequent devel-
opment of Western Society.” 7 Moreover, since Christianity “did not
claim jurisdiction over secular society,” it established the basis for
the secularization of society and for its unification in terms of a set
of commonly shared values, 8 "Catholic Christianity also made a
place for an independent intellectual culture which is unique
among all the great religions in their medieval phase.” 9 Moving in
a similar direction, Protestant cultures were the “spearheads” of
the educational revolution of the nineteenth century and the
"general cultivation of things intellectual and particularly the
sciences.” 10

Not only has Christianity provided the underpinning for the
distinctive Western economy, science, intellectual autonomy, legal
structure, and secularization, but it has also contributed to the
development of individual character, since “the internalization of
religious values certainly strengthens character.” 11 It is the basis
for the dignity of the individual, fostering a “new autonomy for the
individual,” 12 which, in turn, has had political consequences:
“The most important single root of modern Democracy is Christian
individualism.” 13 Christianity’s respect for the dignity of the in-
dividual person, related to its possession of “a certain strain of

256 The World of Talcott Parsons

egalitarianism,” 14 fosters a variety of the humanitarian elements
that distinguish modem life: the opposition to discrimination
against persons not justified by merit or demerit, 15 opposition to
grinding poverty, illness, premature death, and unnecessary suffer-
ing; these are all “undesirable from the Christian standpoint.” 10 In
short, behind the humane Welfare State, Parsons finds Christi-
anity.

In consequence of the benign influence of Christianity, says
Parsons, “there can be little doubt that the main outcome has been
a shift in social conditions more in accord with the general pattern
of Christian ethics than was medieval society.” 17 Things, in brief,
have never been better, not only in terms of the power, but also in
terms of the goodness and morality of modem fife. With proper
scholarly prudence, Parsons acknowledges that “the millennium
definitely has not arrived,” but emphasizes that, “in a whole variety
of respects modern society is more in accord with Christian values
than its forebears have been.” 18

Since Parsons attributes this moral enrichment and humaniza-
tion of life largely to Christianity, he is faced with the problem of
responding to those who declare that there has been a general
decline of religion in modem life. 19 Parsons answers that there has
not been such a decline, and feels called upon to explain why the
contrary is so widely believed. He does so, briefly, by holding that
moral standards have not deteriorated; rather, modem men are
facing more difficult problems, and as a result of television and
other mass media, people are now more aware of the evil and
suffering which has always been in the world. 20 Parsons has looked
upon the world and upon the whole history of European civiliza-
tion and contemporary society; he finds it not only powerful but
good, its power and goodness largely deriving from a Christianity
that still retains an abiding vitality. Christianity, for Parsons, has
been the central source of the order, the unity, and the progress of
Western society.

About the only modern developments of significance that Parsons
fails to attribute to Christianity are Marxism and socialism. It is
hard to see how he overlooks them. Surely any number of talented
commentators, engaged in the “dialogue” between Marxism and
Christianity, have already related them. Some, like Alasdair Mac-
Intyre, 2 1 regard Marxism not only as rootecTirf Christianity but as
its only__worthy historical" successor? A nd indeed, the case for a
Christian rooting of Marxism is a very strong one. Perhaps Parsons
is an Edmund Wilson man on this question, seeing Marx as an Old
Testament figure. But Parsons’ avoidance of this connection is at
least more cautious than those he confronts. But it is anomalous in
the light of his quest for the universal inclusion of everything under

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 257

the Christian banner. Undoubtedly it derives from the sheer con-
tradiction it would generate: to deny socialism and Marxism an
origin in Christianity is to acknowledge that an enormous part of
modem culture owes little to Christianity; to affirm that Marxism
is influenced by Christianity is to acknowledge Christianity as a
major source of “disorder” and conflict, let alone downright “sub-
version,” in modern society — best, therefore, not to mention it.

To evaluate Parsons’ assertions concerning the role of Christi-
anity would take nothing less than a review of Western history for
the last two thousand years; but since they are merely assertions
it would seem that this could wait upon the presentation of his
evidence on their behalf. The assertions are not only undocu-
mented, they are also not terribly persuasive, even impression-
istically. B oth Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were Christi an
cultures , fmtneither was impressively concerned with the dignity
of the individual, political democracy, intellectual autonomy, or
the defense of the individual from arbitrary authority. Correspond-
ingly, Japan is not a Christian culture, yet its development of a
modern science, technology, and industrial economy seems in no
way impaired by this. Christian churches have, moreover, blessed
opposing armies in wars fought among peoples for more than a
thousand years, when they have not themselves trumpeted the call
for holy crusades and inter-religious massacres; some have sanc-
tioned slavery and opposed child labor legislation, public contra-
ceptive facilities, and legal abortion. Say what Parsons will about
the Church’s role in furthering science, the history of the warfare
between science and religion was not simply the figment of some
bigoted historian’s imagination: there remains Galileo. My object
here, however, is not to refute Mr. Parsons’ claims on behalf of
Christianity; indeed, the burden of proof is on him. I wish only to
make it clear that there is a persistent and systematic one-sidedness
in them. They are saturated with a kind of “piety,” which, in Robert
Nisbet’s formulation, “represents a conviction that full understand-
ing of social phenomena is impossible save in terms of a recogni-
tion of the unalterable, irreducible role of the religious impulse,” 22
and they verge on Christian apologetics — in the serious scholastic
sense, of course.

25 s

The World of Talcott Parsons

FUNCTIONALISM AND RELIGION: SOME SURVEY DATA

Parsons’ piety, however, is not an individual idiosyncrasy; it is, on
the contrary, a general disposition of the larger school of modern
Functional social theory, of which he is the fountainhead. The best
evidence on this matter derives from our national survey of Ameri-
can sociologists, for this clearly shows that the religious orienta-
tions of Functionalists differ from the religious orientations of
those opposed to Functionalism. Using the question noted above
(p. 247), to tap attitudes toward Functionalism, we found that
those favorable to it have greater religiosity and stronger religious
affiliations. 23

One question we asked sociologists was whether or not they had
ever thought of becoming clergymen, as well as whether or not they
were presently members of the clergy. Here we found that, al-
though all groups were preponderantly “favorable” toward Func-
tionalism, those who were clergy were only about half as likely to
be unfavorable to it as those who were not clergy. More specifically,
about five percent of the clergy were unfavorable, but almost ten
percent of those who were not clergy were similarly unfavorable.
Leaving aside indeterminate answers, we also found a slight
tendency for those who were clergymen to be more favorable than
were those who had not become clergyman, yet once had thought
of doing so; and they, in turn, were also slightly more favorable
than those who had never thought of becoming clergy. The per-
centages of the favorable among these three groups were: eighty-
seven percent, eighty-six percent, and eighty-one percent.

A similar but more pronounced association was found between
sociologists’ attitudes toward Functionalism and the frequency with
which they attended church. It is instructive to look at the two
most extreme groups. Among those most favorable to Functional-
ism only thirty percent never went to church, while fifty-five per-
cent of those least favorable to Functionalism never attended
church. Looking at the “most frequent” church attenders, we found
among them 27.8 percent of those most favorable to Functionalism
but only ten percent of those least favorable to Functionalism.

If we take frequency of church attendance as an indicator of the
degree of religiosity, it seems clear that those favorable to Func-
tionalism are more likely to be religious than those unfavorable.
This is further confirmed by the response to a question concerning
religious affiliation. Table 7-1 plainly suggests that those without

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 259

a religious affiliation are more unfavorable to Functionalism than
those having any religious affiliation.

TABLE 7-1

RELIGIOUS' AFFILIATION

CATHOLIC

OTHER

PROTESTANT

JEWISH

NONE

Attitude

(+)

.88

.86

.84

.80

.78

(?)

.07

.09

.08

.09

.08

Functionalism

(-)

.05

.08

.11

.14

N+ 320

1446

497

1054

This table shows that those least favorable to Functionalism are
those who report no religious affiliation and whom I would suspect
to be the least religious group. Indeed, the percentage of this group
which is unfavorable to Functionalism is more than twice that of
Catholics. Of those reporting some religious affiliation. Catholics
are the most favorable to Functionalism and Jews the least so.

If we wish to grasp why and how Functionalism places such
great stress upon morality, especially upon transcendental and non-
empirical values, as Parsons calls them, we must first recognize
that this is compatible with the importance it also ascribes to reli-
gion. Concerns with morality and with religion are mutually rein-
forcing. Certainly, however, the religious side of modem Function-
alism is, compared to its expression in Comtianism, much muted.
The modern Functionalist’s religious impulse is less Catholic in
tone and more consistent with a soberly rational religion, yet one
which, if it does not pray to Almighty God, still pays its earnest
respects “To Whom It May Concern.”

In American Functionalism, the Catholic ritualistic accoutre-
ments of the Positivist religion have been sublimated by its develop-
ment within a relatively Protestant culture. The religious impulse
is now expressed in a kind of Ethical Culture religion, whose
presence is revealed by and concentrated in the potency and char-
acter it ascribes to moral values. What Parsons calls transcendental,
nonempirical values call forth the same sentiments of respect
and the same sense of the sacred as do more traditional attitudes
toward the supernatural. These transcendental values are the in-
visible ultimates, the final answers to the society’s “wherefore?”;
they are the that-which-there-is-nothing-higher-than. Under what
social conditions does such a sense of “respect” emerge? How does
such a conception of the sacred arise? Parsons does not so much
wish to explain as to locate it. The sacred is somehow within cul-
ture, but how it got there remains mysterious.

The Parsonsian "sacred” thus no longer has an icon, a cult, or a

26 o

The World of Talcott Parsons

God. It is an unexplained protoplasmic sentiment, a hungry piety
that may reach out and endow anything with a touch of divinity.
The sense of the sacred is, for Parsons, at the core of the moral
system, which is, in turn, at the center of the social universe. The
godhead abides, uncelebrated but potent and mysterious, within
morality.

For me the interesting problem is not, as it is for Shils, for ex-
ample, to account for the lack of religious sensibility in other soci-
ologists; I am, rather, perplexed at the continued presence of a
religious impulse in the theoretical tradition of Functionalists. In
general, I believe that it is, in one part, due to the tension between
men of knowledge and their society; in other words, it is a special
case of ambition frustrated. It derives, I would suggest, from the
technological weakness of sociology now and from the inability of
sociologists to achieve the high place they seek in society through
the practical contributions they can make. The religious impulse
of sociology, that is, arises and is sustained when sociologists and
sociology lack the very power that they attribute to society. It be-
tokens a great gap between the ambitions of sociologists and the
means they have to realize them as scientists and technicians;
piety, in short, becomes a substitute for power.

The muted religious impulse of sociology, its present piety as
well as its earlier full-fledged religious form, is an adjustment to
the tension between great expectations and very modest perform-
ances; between great opportunities and the inability to seize them;
between high hopes and low achievements; between great human
needs and sociology’s meager capacity to satisfy them with the
technology and knowledge it commands. A sociological religion of
humanity, or a sociology modeled on religion, seeks to solve the
problem of how — here and now, in this very weak condition — the
expectations can be fulfilled, the opportunities mastered, the hopes
achieved, the needs satisfied, and of how sociology can be made an
influence now in the lives of ordinary men. Finding itself still far
from able to provide a useful technology, sociology consoles itself
and the world with piety.

From the very beginnings of the Positivistic tradition from
which Functionalism evolved, sociology has experienced a central
dilemma. On one side, Positivism clearly sought to change society
and influence the lives of ordinary men. On the other side, Posi-
tivism — especially in its Comtian development — manifested a
monastic impulse to be detached from man and society; in some
part, this was an expression of resentment bom of the failure to be
heard, to win the support, the recognition, and the influence it be-
lieved its due. These two opposing impulses may be discerned in all

The Uoralistics of Talcott Parsons 261

sociology deriving from the Comtian tradition. The dilemma, then,
persists.

There was and still is a persistent tendency to resolve this di-
lemma by infusing sociology with a religious character. This was
done by Comte in his development of a full-fledged sociological
religion of humanity. It is done by Parsons, in more muted form,
in his development of a social theory that stands witness to the
central importance of the sacred in the lives of men, by devoting
itself to the celebration of the morality in which the sacred is held
to dwell. Faced with a social crisis such as the Depression of the
1930’s, the tendency of Functional social theory is to shore up
morality. Since it holds that at the heart of morality are sentiments
of sacred respect, any crisis of society is seen as the product of a
failure of its sense of the sacred, in all the places where, presum-
ably, it dwells: tradition, authority, and religion. Its diagnosis
comes down to the unstated conclusion that great evils befall men
and society when God dies. Its therapeutic response, therefore, can
only be to protect morality, intensify a sense of the sacred, and
preserve the godhead. The "consensual sociology” that Shils pro-
claims involves a consensus between men of worldly authority and
priestly sociologists, who between them can reunite the temporal
and the moral realms and thus maintain order in society. He under-
stands well and deeply that Parsons has at long last established the
theoretical basis for fulfilling the Comtian program.

When sociology infuses itself with a religious character, it does
not require a new and potent technology to fulfill or to legitimate
its ambitions. In infusing itself with a religious character, sociology
can now draw upon those means available to any religion: the
protection, revitalization, and transformation of morality, and the
fostering of men’s submission to it. The essential solution to social
problems which this tradition advances is the cultivation of the
moral system, to which it now relates itself as guardian and
steward. Yet there is a revealing paradox in its “scientific” relation
to moral belief. On one side, it extols their potency, but, on the
other, it does not profane their sacred character with systematic
research. Its attitude toward morality is the attitude of religion
and the religious toward the place where the god dwells; it regards
it as both potent and untouchable.

There is this fundamental paradox not only in the Functionalist’s
science of morality, but also in his posture toward practical human
problems, concerning which the diagnosis must always be clearer
than the remedy. For, while it affirms that the most fundamental
root of any social malaise is moral, it cannot grasp and use this in
instrumentally manageable solutions, for it conceives morality as

262

The World of Talcott Parsons

sacred, which means that it is not instrumentally manageable.
Such a sociology can therefore be made “practiced” only in the
same way that religion is : by relating men to the sacred. It is made
practical by placing at its center a concern with what it defines as
sacred or, rather, by defining as sacred what it has made central,
and by fostering appropriate sentiments and behavior toward it.

THE PIETY OF FUNCTIONALISM

If I am correct in believing that there is a religious cast to Func-
tionalism — not merely an "element,” but something that pervades
its culture — then how are we to judge it? We might begin by noting
that our judgment of Functionalism as the embodiment of a
religious feeling is not essentially different from that often made
of Marxism, although considerably better documented.

When Marxism is judged to be religious, it is often tacitly
assumed that this demonstration of a religious aspect discredits
the scientific aspect. I believe no such thing. In speaking of Func-
tionalism’s religious aspect, I do not for a moment intend thereby
to impugn its intellectual merits. These simply must be judged on
other, independent grounds. Conversely, it is also often implied,
by those who speak of Marxism’s religious character, that to
demonstrate its lack of conformity with the imputed methods of
science must strengthen the supposition that it is religious. It is in
this vein that Robert Tucker remarks: “Scientific theories normally
arise after their authors have immersed themselves in the empirical
data that the theory seeks to explain. But not so with the Marxian
science of history according to its founders .” 24 This is a merely
mythological conception of how scientific theories arise. As is so
common, it substitutes the morality of science for the sociology of
science, a preconception of how it should arise for a study of how
it actually does arise. Being no Aristotle in command of all sciences,
I shall say only that Tucker’s view simply does not conform with
what I have seen in the social sciences. And I shall drop the
matter by noting that it should be perfectly obvious by now that
Talcott Parsons is, in this respect, not one whit better than Marx.
Parsons’ theory was certainly not based upon an “immersal” in the
“empirical data.” If, as. Tucker holds, Marxism “came into being by
means of the transformational criticism of Hegel’s philosophy of

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 263

history," Parsons’ theory came into being by means of his criticism
of Pareto, Sombart, Weber, and Durkheim.

Even if we were to regard Functionalism and Marxism as both
similarly religious, it needs to be added that there are vital dif-
ferences in the nature of their religions. Indeed, nothing could
make this clearer than Mr. Tucker’s own study of Marxism as a
religious myth. It is one of his central themes that Marxism arose
out of a theoretical tradition, from Hegel to Feuerbach, in which
there is seen “no absolute difference between the human nature and
the divine”; Tucker observes that, in an early article, Engels hel d
t hat “God is m an’’ Yet there was certainly never a contention, at
least in Feuerbach and Marx, to the effect that there was no
“difference between the human nature and the divine.” They never
claimed knowledge of a divine nature, but only of human nature,
from whose alienated condition, they maintained, there arose a
human conception of divine nature. Moreover, even if he spoke
elliptically, it deserves to be noted that Engels did not say. God i s
society — And here is the crucial difference between Marxism and
Functionalism.

For, whatever the outcome of the Leninist version of Marxism
in Russia, and despite the development of the overgrown, paranoid
Stalinist state, the earliest focus of Marx and Engels was on the
liberation of man, and not of society. The ultimate intention was
not merely a withering away of the state which stood above men,
but a total transformation of society itself, because it was viewed as
subjecting men to a crippling alienation. “It is above all necessary
to avoid postulating ‘society’ once again as an abstraction confront-
ing the individual,” said Marx. “The individual is the social being.
The manifestation of his life ... is therefore a manifestation of
social life.” 25

The Marxist focus, then, was on the liberation of “real individual
man.” In his early manuscripts in particular, Marx speaks of man
not only as a social creature but as an intrinsically powerful
“species being,” whose species products are religion, the family, the
state, law, science, and economics. The liberation of this species
being was intended to be a liberation of the creative and sensuous
powers of “real individual man”; that is, of the “five senses” with
which embodied man is endowed as a species being. “The tran-
scendence of private property is, therefore, the complete emancipa-
tion of all the human senses and attributes.” Thus, if Marxism was
a religion, it was not a religion of society, as is Functionalism, but
a religion of man. It was a religion of pride in man and struggle on
his behalf, not a religion of piety toward society and quiescent
conformity to it. Whatever the scientific demerits of Marxism, it

264 T^ e World of Talcott Parsons

may be placed alongside Functionalism with confidence that it is
not its moral character that will be found wanting. And since we
have here been speaking of Marxism and Functionalism as re-
ligions, the question of their moral character is by no means
irrelevant.

Although running the risk of seeming to protest too much, I
must say once again that, in having noted Functionalism’s religious
character, I have no sense that I am engaged in an “unmasking.”
While somewhat surprised at what I found, I am not repelled.
I have always thought it odd that men who profess to a respect for
religion should act so triumphant when they uncover a religious
side to Marxism, and that they should hold this up before us as if
it were the conclusive argument. Although I am not “religiously
musical” — to borrow Max Weber’s term 20 — I do experience this
exercise in righteousness as somewhat repellent. I cannot share
in this sport of baiting the “false religion,” because I have too keen
a sense of the close connection that exists between religion, any
religion, and human suffering; and I experience contempt for
religion as callousness toward suffering. If I disapprove of Func-
tionalism, it is not because it has a religious dimension, but
because of the kind it has, and most especially because of the
kind of morality it seems to embody.

Similarly, although I judge the priest by what he serves, I see
nothing humorous, contemptible, or degrading in priesthood itself.
In writing of Functional Sociologists as men having a priestly side
to them, I hope that this communicates what is intended: namely,
that they often are men of principle, not pandering opportunists.
At any rate, the best of them live for, not off, sociology. If they
serve order in society, they are usually acting with authenticity,
out of their own deeply felt convictions. If they refrain from social
criticism, it is often because of, not cowardice, but a priestly
reticence toward public life, and perhaps because they believe that
they must deliver unto Caesar the things that are his. Like priests,
they feel they must minister to their flocks wherever they are and
whatever they do. Yet, like priests, they also have a sense of
distance and removal from the society around them, even as they
do their duty toward it; And, like priests everywhere, they accept
the compromises that they believe must be made to maintain the
church. I should note, moreover, that these comments are only
about the best among the Functional Sociologists. I am well aware
that there are priests manques; that many who enter have no
aptitude for the life; and that some join a monastery because they
like its wine cellar.

In suggesting that Functional Sociologists have a priestly side
and Functional Sociology a religious side, be assured (if you must)

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 265

that I am not saying that the former wear priestly collars or that
the latter has ordained them or is itself conventionally defined as
a church. I am, rather, thinking of the moralistic piety with which
Functionalists often regard society and indeed science itself.

I have previously indicated what I take to be this pious concep-
tion of society. In what follows I want to focus briefly on the con-
ception of science congenial to many Functional Sociologists, to
show how it is congruent with their conception of society, and, in
particular, how it is infused with a sense of sacredness. Just as
Functional Sociologists have often conceived of society on the
model of a godhead, so too are they disposed to conceive of science
on the model of a religion. Functional Sociology, for them, serves
as a link between man and the sacred and transcendental power of
society, mediated by the activities of a group of priest-like spe-
cialists — Functional Sociologists themselves — who have scientific
resources, skills, and powers that are sacred.

For Functionalists, science and social science are not merely
practical, useful activities; indeed, Functionalists have sometimes
gone out of their way to restrain sociology’s inherent impulse to
be applied; to them science and social science are “high” things of
intrinsic value. Science is not seen as an everyday, secular activity
inherently accessible and akin to the activities of ordinary men.
It is, instead, seen as the activity of very special, somber, austere,
dedicated, perhaps heroic men; it is to be spoken of deferentially;
it is to be treated solemnly; it is to be approached circumspectly;
and great care must be taken to conform to its rules and rituals.
Indeed, Functionalists often conceive of the contributions of
scientists, including sociologists, as a purchase on immortality.
With respect to the prescriptions that are deemed appropriate to
sociology, the watchwords, as I mentioned earlier, are continuity,
cumulation, codification, convergence, the joyless prescriptions of
a structuralizing methodology that is the fit counterpart of an
Apollonian vision of society. (And one might wonder how it
happens that all these watchwords begin with a “c” if there is not
just a bit of cabalistic magic in them.) Functionalism, in short,
seems to have a distinctive conception of social science and its
methodology, as having developed out of and still remaining
charged with sacred sentiments that are engaged in a dialectic
with a hidden anxiety.

Let me say, however, once and for all, that if I had a choice
only between a Functionalist conception of science as “sacred”
and a conception of it as a “business,” I would have no hesitation
in opting for the former. Better pious than crass, better anxious
than smug. But I do not believe that these are the only alternatives
that sociologists have. Sylvan Tompkins’ work on the psychology

266 The World of Talcott Parsons

of knowledge is valuable here precisely because it begins to for-
mulate alternative views of science and, furthermore, plainly lays
out their links with different domain assumptions about man and
society. 27

There is, says Tompkins, one conception of science — closely
convergent, I would add, with that held by the Functionalists—
in which stress is placed upon the value of science in separating
truth from falsity, and reality from fantasy. This view of science
emphasizes man’s vulnerability to error, the wisdom of the past,
the importance of not making errors, the value of thought in keep-
ing people on the straight and narrow, the necessity of objectivity
and detachment, and the importance of discipline and correction
by facts. Corresponding to this conception of science, suggests
Tompkins, is the conception that man is, at bottom, evil, and that,
therefore, government’s first duty is superintendence. In this view
science is something above men, controlling and rectifying their
natively untrustworthy impulses and austerely maintaining a safe
distance from those studied.

In contrast to this view of science, Tompkins outlines an alterna-
tive which stresses man’s activity, his capacity for invention and
progress, and the value of novelty and of intimacy with the things
being studied. Here science does not serve as a suspicious watch-
dog but trusts man’s imagination and intuition as contributive to
knowledge. This view of science, says Tompkins, also corresponds
to an image of both man and society; men are felt to be good, and
it is the satisfaction of their individual needs and the promotion
of their welfare that is deemed the most important function of
government.

SOCIAL BASES OF MORAL CONCERN

Thus far, I have related Functionalism’s stress upon morality very
largely to elements internal to the theoretical tradition out of
which it emerged or to the special social conditions that theorists,
and academicians more generally, encounter in their larger society.
But if these combine to dispose Functional theorists toward a stress
on morality, it seems doubtful that they alone suffice to sustain it.
I would not want to imply that social theorists foist such views
upon an unwilling society, a society that does not resonate to its
message and has no demand for it. There is, rather, a “fit” between

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 267

the needs of the larger society and the moral emphasis of the
theory. In other words, living in modem society generates the same
deep need for morality in the theorist as it does in others, and an
emphasis upon the importance of morality is as much a response
to this personal experience as it is an “objective” report on the
needs of the society.

An understanding of the nature of the experience that generates
this personal need for morality in the theorist as in others, may be
approached on two levels of analysis: in terms of an analysis of,
first, certain existential problems of living in almost any kind of a
society and, second, some of the unique problems of living in . a
modern industrial society. Both approaches will help clarify the
role of morality in an industrial society and show why even such
a society does not lead men to seek only the distinctive kinds of
gratifications that modern technology can increasingly supply.

I shall begin by approaching the problem of the sources of
morality on the most general level. The language of morality —
hence morality itself, for it is not accessible to study except through
its linguistic manifestations — arises in the social world in situa-
tions where what men want, the gratifications they seek, are pre-
carious and uncertain. The crux of the whole matter is that
morality is rooted in the scarcity and contingency of desired objects
or performances. The “primeval scene” in which morality first
forms has this character: someone ivants something; but what he
wants is something that he cannot procure by his own unaided
effort; the satisfaction of his wants is therefore contingent upon
what others do, either to aid or hinder him in his pursuits; finally,
these others are not altogether ready to provide or do what he
wants, or, at any rate, the things desired from them are felt to be
somewhat contingent. The “primeval” problem, then, is how one
man can arrange his relation with another so as to more reliably
secure what he wants. We begin, thus, with this deliberately
simplified model in which “Ego” wants “O” from “Alter.” Why he
wants “O” is irrelevant here, although it is important to remember
that he can want it to a greater or lesser degree.

Having an interest in getting what he wants from Alter, and
recognizing that satisfaction cannot be taken for granted, Ego
will become interested in his chances for success, and he will
develop some ideas about the factors that will affect them. There
are at least two aspects of Alter’s disposition in which Ego will
come to be interested: first, whether Alter is willing to do as Ego
wants and, second, whether he is able to do so. And Ego will make
imputations about Alter in both terms. Note that, at this point,
nothing has been said about whether Ego thinks that Alter should
do as he, Ego, wants, for we are trying to understand the conditions

z&3 The World of Talcott Parsons

under which such a morally formulated notion of Alters duty
arises: that is what needs to be explained. To further simplify
matters, I shall also assume that Ego simply dichotomizes his
imputations about Alters willingness and ability to do as he wants.
That is, he assumes that Alter is either willing or unwilling, able
or unable, to do so. From this simplified standpoint four possi-
bilities emerge:

First, Alter is seen by Ego as being neither willing nor able to
do as he wants. Ego then faces the choice of either persisting in
what he wants or in some way changing the demand he makes on
Ego. In the latter event. Ego will seek “X” from Alter instead of "0.”
But if Ego persists in wanting “O,” and if he believes that Alter is
both unwilling and unable to provide it, he is likely to seek another
source of supply. The decision is to change either what is sought
and/or from whom it is sought. In general, the relative cost of
doing each of these and the availability of the alternatives will be
among the factors shaping Ego’s decision. If Ego can surrender
neither his goal nor his wish that Alter himself supply it, he may
then simply act in a punitive way toward Alter, substituting an
expressive action for an instrumentally suitable one.

Second, and directly opposite to the above situation, is one in
which Ego views Alter as both willing and able to provide what he
wants. In this event there is no problem. Ego can let matters take
their course and need not seek to influence Alters behavior in any
way.

There is a third possible situation, in which Alter is seen as
willing but unable to provide what Ego wants. Here, Ego’s reaction
will depend upon his view of Alter’s inability and the extent to
which he regards it as modifiable. If Ego regards Alter’s “inability”
as unchangeable, his alternatives are essentially those described in
the first situation. That is, Ego can change what he wants or can
retain his goal but seek it from someone else. If, however, Ego
views Alter’s inability as changeable, he may seek to render Alter
capable of doing what he wants, perhaps by “educating” him in
some manner, improving Alter’s skills or helping him to improve
his resources. Here Ego has no incentive to threaten or punish
Alter.

Finally, there is a fourth possible situation, which brings us to
the heart of the matter. Ego may view Alter as able but unwilling
to do as he wants. Here, Ego will attempt to influence Alter in some
manner, by exhortation or command, or by supplying incentives or
punishments, or by threatening or promising to do so. Whatever
the method, the objective here is to modify Alter’s motives. Here
again, however, it needs to be added that this all depends upon
Ego’s cost. Demographic, ecological, and technological considera-

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 269

tions, the number, location, transportability, and availability of
other suppliers and supplies noil be basic factors shaping the out-
come.

It is primarily in this situation, I would suggest, that the lan-
guage and sentiments of morality — of “ought” and "should” — arise
and are most fully developed and used. Morality and moral claims
are one basic way in which Ego can get Alter to do as he wants.
We view morality as emerging in situations in which there is a
scarcity or contingency of desired performances or objects, and
when this is defined by Ego as due to Alter’s umirillingness to
provide them, rather than to his lack of skill, competence, or
resources and facilities. In sum, morality is more likely to emerge:
(a) the more that Ego wants something, and (b) the more that he
defines Alter as able but unwilling to provide this thing, and (c)
the more costly it is for Ego to remove or replace Alter with
someone else.

The problem may be reviewed from another familiar perspective.
When Ego judges Alter in terms of his “willingness” and “ability”
to do as he wishes, Ego is, in effect, judging Alter’s “goodness” and
"potency.” That is, the judgment of “goodness” is contingent on
and connected with a judgment of “willingness.” This is not a
reversible connection. Ego does not judge Alter as willing because
he defines him as good, but rather he judges him as good, in part,
because he defines him as willing; and conversely, as bad, because
unwilling. “Goodness” or “badness” is a cryptic or disguised judg-
ment that Ego makes of Alter when Ego feels that Alter is willing
or unwilling to do as he w'ants. The “good” object is one that does
not frustrate us, does not resist our will, gives us what we want;
in short, it is an object that gratifies. But gratification is only
nuclear to the “good,” not coextensive with it. There is a gap be-
tween saying, “He is willing to do as I want, ’’and saying, “He is
good.” The problem, in effect, is under w’hat conditions does the
primitive feeling, “I dislike people who do not do as I wish,” come
to be translated into, ‘They are bad people.”

One such condition, I have suggested, is where Ego holds that
Alter is able to do as Ego wishes. It is unrealistic and "unreasona-
ble” for Ego to expect something from Alter that he is unable to
provide, and Ego can often recognize this. In this sense, “ought
implies can.” That is, the moral judgment premises a prior judg-
ment of potency. Only potent people, or people to w’hom a measure
of potency is imputed, and who are therefore "responsible for their
actions,” can be either good or bad. It is only as people gain or
accept a measure of autonomy and become loci of potency that
they become capable of behaving in a manner subject to moral
judgment.

270 The World of Talcott Parsons

As mentioned above, Ego might get what he wants not only by
changing Ego’s motives but also by coercing him in some manner.
If Ego has power enough to do this, he can “command” Alters
performance. Conversely, Ego might provide positive incentives,
benefiting or rewarding Alter for doing as he wishes. The exercise
of compulsion or offering of incentive is feasible in this situation
because Alter can, if he wants, do as Ego wishes. It is not feasible
where Alter is simply unable to do so, or is believed to be unable.
There are thus two ways that Ego can proceed: through some
“appeal” that aims at modifying Alter’s motives, or through some
constraint or incentive. Actually, both constraint and incentive
will also modify Ego’s motives, his willingness or readiness to
comply, but this change is situational, and when the incentive or
the coercion is removed, Alter will probably revert to unwillingness.

Such situation-linked motivation is not a stable, reliable way for
Ego to get what he wants from Alter, for it will vary with the
vagaries in Ego’s situation — with his ill health, bad luck, droughts,
or anything else that undermines his ability to coerce or reward
Alter. If Alter’s compliance is entirely contingent on these situa-
tional impulses, the reliability of his future conformity is slight. It
may be severely disrupted even by casual impairments of Ego’s
powers and resources. Ego therefore faces the problem of persuad-
ing Alter to do as he wishes even when these contingencies occur.
Ego must reduce the contingency in Alter’s performance that arises
from the contingency of his own powers and resources. For indeed,
no matter how great Ego’s power, it is always possible for Alter to
enter into coalitions with others and to mobilize a countervailing
power.

Faced with someone who is able but unwilling to do as he wishes,
and against whom his own power and his own ability to promise
benefits or threaten punishments is always, at some point, limited,
Ego must therefore find a way to modify Alter’s motives that
does not depend upon the benefits or punishments he can provide.
This must, then, take the form of some “appeal” that, on the one
hand, is not narrowly situational and, on the other, is not related
to promised benefits or threatened punishments. This is essentially
the character of moral language. It is not situational, for it always
refers to performance in a class of situations and for a category of
persons. A moral claim always refers to what should be done in a
type of situation by a type of person. There is no moral claim that
is incumbent on only one specific person in only one concrete
instance. Behind the specific claim that one friend makes on the
other is the assumption that “friends” generally owe this to one
another. And, again, moral claims are characteristically not held
to be incumbent because of the consequences of conformity with

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 271

or violation of them: that is, anticipated rewards or punishments.
They are held to be appropriate "for their own sake.”

Morality is a rhetoric Ego uses to mobilize Alters motives for
complying with his wants, without express reference to the manner
in which the situation will be changed by improved benefits or by
avoided costs. It defocalizes situational consequences. It implies
that these are not relevant to the decision to do or not-do what is
sought. On the one side, it implies that Alter should do some-
thing regardless of whether or not he will gain or lose from it. On
the other, wiien Ego demands conformity with a moral claim, he is
intimating that he is not doing so because of any partisan interest
or any personal advantage he will derive if Alter complies. The
social function of the language of morality, then, is to induce
actions without the exercise of power or compulsion and apart
from the offering of rewards. Making claims in moral terms
projects a specific image of persons, as “unselfish.” There is, in
this sense, always some implication that the moral person is “dis-
interested." In short, the social function of morality is to stop
contention about the distribution of advantages.

Several other functions are also worth noting. One is to resolve
ambivalence about doing or not-doing something, by throwing
support to one side or the other, thus cutting the Gordian knot of
sheer indecision; it facilitates the overcoming of internal conflicts.
Also, morally sanctioned claims function as “deficit-financing” or
credit-creating mechanisms in social relations. Not being situation-
ally narrow, they inhibit Alter from immediately withholding com-
pliance from Ego's demands, even when it is clear that Ego’s ability
to provide reciprocal rewards may be temporarily impaired. They
thus sustain the relation until Ego can resume his benefits to Alter
or until it becomes clear that he will never do so.

If morality solves certain problems, it also creates others and
generates distinctive kinds of vulnerabilities and costs for social
systems. One of these involves the hiatus between the desired and
the desirable, between the gratificational nucleus and the moral
stipulation. This hiatus derives from the fact that, in pursuing his
own wants, Ego is seeking the somewhat reluctant cooperation of
others who also have their ovm wants and w’hose very reluctance
to attend to his wants derives, in some part, from the fact that they
are much concerned with satisfying their own.

The expression of a want as a moral claim intrinsically consti-
tutes a promise of a mutuality of gratification. That is, in formulat-
ing his claim upon Alter in moral terms, Ego is tacitly promising
that he will comply with a similar claim upon himself made by
Alter; or that he will support a similar claim made by Alter upon
a third party; or that he will support an altogether different claim

The World of Talcott Parsons

made by Alter — either upon himself or a third party — which is part
of the larger moral code within which Ego’s original claim upon
Alter is sanctioned. Morality is, in this sense, a tacit promise of
mutuality of gratification and for that reason always entails obliga-
tions as well as rights for each party held to be subject to it.

It is precisely in consequence of this, however, that morality has
certain distinctive vulnerabilities, for there is always some point
at which the fit between morality and gratification is subject to
strain. For, every moral code invariably contains tacit promises
from which some derive more gratification than others; which are
more costly or rewarding for some to comply with than for others;
and which, therefore, some are more ready to enforce than others.
Every moral code always entails obligations that some are reluctant
to perform, although they do admit (in part, have to admit) them
in order to mobilize support for those other claims in which they
happen to be most interested. Every moral code thus involves a
“Noble Lie.” And some will always be ready to do less than their
own moral commitments imply and, at some point, demand. This
is not due to a failure of “socialization” or to aberrant disturbances;
it is inherent in the nature of a moral code as a system of tacit
mutual promises.

Another of the basic problems generated by moral codes derives
from the fact that they entail at least some obligations be done
“for their own sake alone.” At some point, it demands that one do
his “duty,” even if others have not done theirs in the past and
cannot be expected to in the future. It demands that certain things
be done for, or to, certain others, regardless of whether they are
needy or well-off. In short, it demands that one do the “right thing,”
without consideration of the consequences. From the standpoint of
many moral prescriptions, it is irrelevant how the required action
relates to the prior history of interaction among the parties, or
even whether it generates consequences hurtful to others.

Moral considerations may therefore lead Ego to withhold assist-
ance from or even to hurt a person who has previously helped
Ego. Moral considerations may lead him to do things beneficial
to those who are already advantaged and not do them for those who
are “needy.” Conformity with morality may induce a disregard of
our past indebtedness to others, our future dependence upon them,
and their present needs. Morality may, then, be deeply disruptive
of social systems.

A moral "appetite,” a hunger after righteousness, may be as in-
satiable as any other hunger, and as disruptive of social systems as
the anomie or normlessness that Durkheim deplored. Social sys-
tems know no fury like the man of morality aroused. He cares little
for the good that others have once done him or for the suffering

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 273

they now know. There can be more free-flowing sadism in morality
at high tide, and hence a greater potential for social system
cataclysm, than in even the most expedient behavior. It is not those
who have turned their backs on morality who are invariably the
most hurtful men. It takes righteous men of great moral indigna-
tion to build concentration camps and crematoria.

There is a kind of dialectic between the system of reciprocities
and the system of morality. Each has weaknesses that generate a
need for the other. It is not simply that power and expedient
reciprocities need to be controlled, for so too does morality.

MORALITY AND IMPUTED NONPARTISANSHIP

Although a system of rules may be “morally” sanctioned or legiti-
mated in many different ways — for example, by claiming it to be
old, legal, divinely given — all sanctions have one thing in common:
they tacitly claim that what they establish does not result in
partisan advantage for one group or one sector of the population.
Whatever its specific form, the claim to legitimacy is always a
tacit claim that there is mutuality of benefits. But how is this
mutuality to be known and validated? It is commonly difficult for
men to judge, by direct examination, the allocation of benefits
yielded by a set of rules, for they may be obscured by the unfore-
seeable tangle of long-run consequences.

One way in which determination of the mutuality of benefits
is, however, commonly made, is by examination of the manner in
which the rules arose, or by beliefs about the establishment,
derivation, or origins of the rules. The more that rules are believed
to have developed in a manner that avoids or dispels suspicion of
partisan benefit for certain individuals or groups, the more likely
they are to be defined as legitimate. Certain imputed derivations of
rules are generally more consistent with a belief in their imparti-
ality, and hence their legitimacy, than are others. This means, for
example, that rules commonly believed to have been created
solely by those benefiting under them are less likely to be viewed
as legitimate. Conversely, rules which are conceived of as made
by all who were subject to them, or by groups in which all feel
themselves to be full members, are more likely to be deemed
legitimate.

Similarly, rules that are thought to be a heritage of earlier

274 The World °f Talcott Parsons

generations may, to some degree, be above suspicion of special
advantage to those who are claimants under them, because they
manifestly could not have been made by them. Again, and most
important, rules seen as instituted by some agency which is itself
believed to be nonpartisan will also be more likely to be judged
legitimate than those viewed as deriving from some agency
believed to be allied with one of the contending parties. This, of
course, is one reason why it is supremely important for the “state"
to project and protect a public image of itself as nonpartisan, in
relation to the contending claims or interests within the larger
society.

One of the most common rhetorics for communicating that the
rules governing a group are nonpartisan is to claim that they
derive from the gods and are superintended by them. To hold the
gods to be the fount of morality is an implicit denial that it derives
from, or gives advantage to, the special interests of some limited
social group. It is this that vouchsafes the “justice” of a morality
held to be divinely ordained. It is not merely that the violation of
a morality defined as divinely originated may be viewed as a sacri-
lege that will provoke an inescapable nemesis — although this too,
surely, induces powerful motives for conformity with it. But beyond
such considerations, when rules are attributed to gods who stand
above human groups and their conflicting interests, this in itself
betokens the very impartiality of the rules and thereby endows
them with a legitimacy that induces men to give them a willing
obedience.

POSITIVISM AND THE MORAL CRISIS OF INDUSTRIALISM

Modem Western industrial society arose after the eighteenth cen-
tury Enlightenment in Europe, which had severely undermined
traditional religious beliefs and conceptions of divinity. Indeed, the
very social classes that fostered industrialism were those con-
genial to the Enlightenment. Industrialism itself, with its utilitarian
culture and its affinity for science and rationality, exerted con-
siderable strain on traditional religious beliefs, beyond even any
special polemical animus and regardless of whether or not science
and traditional religion were judged to be ‘logically” compatible.
The emergence of utilitarian industrialism was accompanied by
and induced the sharpest impairment of traditional religious beliefs

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 275

— of conceptions of the supernatural and of an afterlife — those
which had, hitherto, contributed to the sensed legitimacy of the
moral code of Western Europe. The gods began to die, and with
their dying the legitimacy of the entire moral system of Western
Europe was threatened. And even the most dire expectations of
those who foresaw the impending crisis were fulfilled in the rise
of figures such as the Marquis de Sade, who concluded that if
nothing was absolutely right then absolutely nothing was wrong.

Much of the emphasis on morality in Positivistic Sociology was
a response to this emerging moral crisis, an effort to find some
other, nonsupematural, sanctioning of the moral order. In this
light Positivism’s effort to establish a secular, nonsupernatural
religion of man is understandable. Its problem was to find a
“secular” religion consistent with the new utilitarianism — that is,
one without God and without a conception of an afterlife — that
could endow common morality with legitimacy.

At first, Positivists believed that this could be done through sci-
ence; they assumed that science’s imputed certainty and imper-
sonality could underwrite the legitimacy of moral codes with the
very nonpartisanship that was required. The impersonal detach-
ment of social science could provide, Comte believed, a morality-
legitimating nonpartisanship. Detachment was not simply seen as
conducive to better research or to truth for its own sake, or as of
value to social scientists alone. Its historically latent function was
to underwrite the legitimacy of the social scientist as the giver of
a morality that was to come from social science.

This Positivistic effort to legitimate morality through science
and a secular religion of man failed. Later developments in social
science, from Durkheim to Parsons, record the retreat from Posi-
tivistic scientism, while at the same time giving clear expression
to the need to find other ways, compatible with a highly rational
society, in which Western society’s moral code might yet be sus-
tained. Essentially the answer of modem Functionalism comes
down to saying that a nonrational morality is necessary for the
stability of society as a xuhole. Here again, the legitimacy of mor-
ality is endorsed by the stress upon its nonpartisan character. There
is a paradox in this reply, however, because, in effect, it gives a
rational defense of the nonrational. Since it defends morality in
terms of its rationally imputed societal consequences, these, of
course, are always subject to rational dispute and continued reap-
praisal. Most particularly, the argument is vulnerable to the re-
joinder that, while some moral code may be necessary for social
order, the now existent and specific moral code is not simply
conducive to social order in general, but to the stability of a
specific society with its differential allocation of advantages and

276 The World of Talcott Parsons

liabilities. In short, the moral code remains vulnerable to the
claim that it is the defense of privilege.

The moral crisis, then, has not at all been solved; and, in truth,
for many God is no longer dying, but dead. The search for a basis
to legitimatize the moral code of Western European culture abides.
But it persists under different conditions from those it began under
in post-Enlightenment Europe; and for many, if not most, it is no
longer a matter of central awareness. The moral crisis has not so
much been solved as deferred by the strengthening of the non-
moral bases of social order, particularly the growth of the increas-
ingly abundant gratifications that an industrial civilization is able
to distribute. Western society was stabilized by enabling many men
to gain more gratifications than they had formerly enjoyed — even
though continuing to have a great deal less than others around
them.

Instead of having to use “spiritual” values as a way of bypassing
the social instability induced by a zero-sum game, modem in-
dustrial societies used increased productivity. They stopped playing
a zero-sum game. There is a very substantial sense, then, in which
industrial societies need not be as “spiritual” as previous societies
in order to maintain the stability of their systems, for they have, in
truth, replaced the spiritual with the "material.”

In short, I do not believe that those who speak of a general
decline of moral standards in contemporary society, as many have,
do so merely because the mass media have made them increasingly
aware of evil and suffering in the world, but rather because, in
some part, there is such a decline. In appreciable degree, this
decline is an outcome of the built-in disposition of bourgeois utili-
tarianism toward anomie. For myself, in contrast to Parsons, there
is no dilemma in holding that moral standards are declining, on
the one side, and that certain “decencies” of welfare are increasing,
on the other. For, rather than viewing such increasing decencies as
evidence of an abiding and viable Christian morality, I view them
as largely attributable to growing industrialization with its growing
productivity and distribution of gratifications.

Moreover, I would add that these growing decencies are not
incompatible, but directly correlated, with an increasingly instru-
mental use of people and with a declining “respect for the dignity
of the individual.” In some part, this decline is due to the growth
of technical and professional specialists, who, quite in character
with modern industrialization, consider themselves responsible
solely for the application of narrow technical standards to persons,
often quite apart from their consequences for improving welfare:
“the operation was a success, but. . . .” In some part, it is due also
to the fact that such specialization, by its very universalism, trans-

zjS

The World of Talcott Parsons

MORALITY AND SCARCITY UNDER INDUSTRIALISM

It is, in some part, because men are now increasingly treated as
tilings but still retain the expectation that they will be treated as
persons, that there is continued public concern with morality and
a sense of endemic moral crisis, even if dulled by the outpourings
of new gratifications. But there are other reasons as well and, in-
deed, some that suggest certain basic contradictions in our culture.
One of the most important of these is that the sheer success of
modem technology begins, at some point, to devalue its output. Its
production of gratifications is not correlated in a one-to-one way with
the increases in the gross national product. At some point for all,
and more rapidly for the advantaged and privileged, there is a
declining marginal utility to the new and additional objects and
services. The second television set does not produce as much rap-
ture as the first, the third car not as much bliss as the second.
Industrialism is subject to the law of the declining rate of gratifica-
tion, which, in time, diminishes the value of the very thing it does
best. A technologically advanced society, then, can defer the prob-
lem of morality, but it cannot abolish it. And this is precisely
because men are satiable, not insatiable. A rational society that
really wanted to optimize its own social solidarity would obviously
allocate increases in its output to those who would find them most
rewarding, the poor and deprived. But since it is not these relatively
weak groups that determine allocations, the powerful groups con-
tinue to provide themselves with a wastefully large share of the
output.

While there are some social strata in industrial society which
are already beginning to experience the consequences of the law of
declining gratification, the full impact of this trend is still a long
way off. We are now only at the very beginnings of the reaction.
For the present, it is scarcity that remains the dominant problem.
For, while modem industrial civilizations are far more productive
than those in which Positivism first took root, they are still very
far indeed from a level of productivity that would- enable them to
satisfy even the most basic needs of the population of the whole
world. And this will become a most pressing requirement as the
system of international relations is extended to incorporate new
nations, which have a claim to aid either out of humane or politi-
cal considerations. Even if the existent industrial plants through-
out the world were used at full capacity, and if the total output was

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 279

divided equally among all persons in the world, the results would
be far, indeed, from universal security and comfort.

This same outcome would most often be the case if the nation
itself were used as the unit of reckoning and the national output
divided only among its own citizens, although the average level of
gratifications would, of course, be much higher in the industrialized
nations. Indeed, this is one reason the nation-state still remains a
viable social unit. It provides a mechanism and a rationale for de-
fining privileged access to gratifications, which go, first and most
directly, to those who are its own citizens and most involved in their
production. It is the viability of the Soviet Union as a nation-state
and the pressure to maintain this privilege-defining role, that re-
quired and enabled it to resist China’s claims that a share of the
Soviet Union’s productivity should underwrite her own industrializa-
tion; this is one of the basic sources of their conflict.

In fine, despite vast increases in industry’s capacity to produce
gratifications, the world still is living within an economy of ex-
cruciating scarcity. This means that the advantaged become power-
ful centers of vested interest, both between and within nations.
These differentials cannot be stably protected by power alone, but
require — both to inhibit claims for reallocations and to justify re-
fusing them — a moral code that the parties involved will commonly
define as legitimate.

Moreover, it is not only that existent levels of productivity are
still far too low; there is the further fact that such productivity as
exists is not all invested in producing goods that might further
stabilize society by dispersing gratifications. An enormous amount of
the gratification-potential of modern industry is drained off for mili-
tary, the moon-doggle, and other nonproductive purposes. Thus the
effective capacity of industrial nations to supply gratifications is
presently far smaller than their potential capacity. Even the most
industrially advanced nations must supply their own citizens with
far fewer gratifications than they might in the absence of continual
military involvement and tensions, let alone outright destruction.

And there is something of a vicious cycle here also: the differ-
ential ability of nations to provide gratifications to their own
members contributes to tensions within and between nations,
which, in turn, require military expenditures that still further im-
pair the availability of gratifications. It is, in part, because military
expenditures compete with welfare funds that the modern nation’s
ability to provide stabilizing gratifications is impaired and it must
supplement consumer goods with moral restraint. There is the
further consideration that the very type of nonproductive activity
required here, namely, military sendee and combat, cannot be
motivated by the kinds of gratification that an industrial civiliza-

280 The World of Talcott Parsons

tion is intrinsically best at providing. The state’s need to maintain
men's motivations to fight and to die creates a market for a morality
that no amount of consumer goods can by itself supply. Where
death is, religion and morality are not far away; let the spectacle
be produced under the auspices of The State, and it may then be
called “glory.”

There is one other fundamental aspect of the functioning of
industrial civilizations that is important here. This is the fact that
industrial production itself entails great costs for those involved in
it. Industrial work requires a great reliability of presence and con-
sistency of performance. Men must appear when and where they are
needed and do precisely what is expected, all within a very narrow
range of variability, even when their own impulses diverge from
these expectations. For many, particularly those doing the unskilled
and semi-skilled work, the tasks are arduous, stultifyingly dull,
tedious, boring, and degrading. In large measure, the deadliness of
much of modern work derives from the manner in which it is or-
ganized socially, which, in turn, is a function of both the master
institutions that govern industry and the level of technology that it
now has at its disposal.

Even where there is extensive unionization, men still have little
control over what they produce and how they produce it; what
they produce is not “theirs.” Why, then, should they invest them-
selves in it, and how, then, can they derive intrinsic gratifications
from it? In consequence, the operation of an industrial civilization
requires an enormously costly discipline of self-expression and of
self by those directly operating it. It requires either habits and
values which reinforce this, if men are to work spontaneously, or, in
their absence, an extensive bureaucracy and an unflagging totali-
tarian superintendence. This problem is particularly acute at the
early stages of an effort at industrialization, when older work pat-
terns are being rejected, when industrial discipline is new, and
when the still low level of industrial productivity is as yet insuffi-
cient to compensate for the costs involved. In some measure,
Stalinism was a response to this problem.

Yet even in advanced industrial societies the problem remains
endemic. If the discipline required is more familiar, for many it
still remains unspeakably tedious and costly. As a result, part of
the very abundance of advanced industrial societies is used up in
compensating people for the new burdens that it has itself gener-
ated. Much of the new gratification produced by industrialism must
therefore go to sheer self-maintenance; that is, some part of the
gratification produced serves to keep people producing it despite
the costs. Although individual improvement is often experienced
and many people are better off than they formerly were, this bet-

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 281

terment does not serve to strengthen men’s loyalty and indebted-
ness to the system as much as it might otherwise, for much of what
they receive is experienced as a compensation for costs they have
already incurred. They often see themselves as getting little more
than they have earned, as having already paid for what they get.
Thus they often experience themselves as being "even” with the
system and may have no stabilizing sense of gratitude or of "out-
standing obligations” to it.

For these several reasons, then, modem industrial civilizations
have urgent need of viable moral systems, despite their increasing
capacity to produce gratifications. Modem morality has grown out
of and remains rooted in scarcity. It is this that lends a measure
of realism to social theories that stress the significance of morality;
it is this that generates structures of feeling which such social
theories resonate meaningfully. At the same time, however, it is
this also, that makes it exceedingly plain that when social theories
fail to see and to say that what men need is an end to wars, an
end to inequalities, an end to scarcity, and an end to dehumanized
work, this makes them an ideology for accommodating to the pres-
ent, rather than one that might transcend it.

The strength of such social theories is precisely that they enable
some men to feel that they conscientiously can, and realistically
must, accommodate themselves to the here and now. The vulner-
ability of such theories is that they of necessity counsel right-living,
temperance and restraint, gradualness, patient acceptance of
deprivation and of the accumulated hurt of living to those vastly
less advantaged. Clearly the trouble with. Functionalism is that it
is committed to the present society, with all its dilemmas, contra-
dictions, tensions, and, indeed, with all its immorality. The trouble
with Functionalism is, in a way, that it is not really committed to
social order in general, but only to preserving its own social order.
It is committed to making things work despite wars, inequities,
scarcity, and degrading work, rather than to finding a way out.

That there are some problems, human finiteness and death, from
which there is no way out, is no excuse. This is not a social system
problem, but a human problem, and is, indeed, not even within the
special province to which such a social theory limits itself. Whether
human beings will ever resign themselves to the fact that they are
mortal is, to my mind, doubtful, but it is irrelevant to the issue at
hand. That men are mortal is no excuse for accommodating to, but
a good reason for opposing, societies that make the little time that
we do live so terribly much less than it might be.

282

The World of Talcott Parsons

SOME DILEMMAS AND PROSPECTS

I shall briefly review some of the major assumptions I have made
here and outline a few of their implications. The level of gratifica-
tions supplied by a society and the level of moral conviction or con-
formity within its culture — the latter may be included within but
far from exhausts the former — are both prime sources of social
solidarity, the willing mutual accommodation among men and
groups. In some measure, each is an alternative to the other as a
source of social solidarity; this means that, to some degree, each is
in competition and conflict with the other. The relative importance
of moral and nonmoral gratifications for the solidarity of society
thus varies under different conditions. In particular, since tech-
nology is one of the major sources of nonmoral gratification, the
relative contribution of moral and nonmoral gratifications to social
solidarity will depend greatly on the level of technology in a society
and on the changes in this level. Given a relatively primitive tech-
nology, then, social solidarity (so far as it exists at all) must rest
more heavily on morality.

Correspondingly, however, as technology develops, it commonly
undermines traditional moralities. Thus a great development in
technology may mean a corresponding impairment of the moral
sources of social solidarity, and, as a result, the “net” growth in the
stability of the technologically advancing society will by no means
have a one-to-one correlation with the growth of its technology. As
technology develops, and to the degree that it produces a corre-
sponding attenuation of the traditional moral code, a greater pro-
portion of the solidarity of a society will depend upon the gratifica-
tions supplied by its technology. In time, however, the latter is
subject to declining marginal utility — there are both short-range
cycles and long-range trends by which the gratifications persons
derive from technology are felt to decline. As this happens, the moral
bases of social solidarity and the “moral problem” tend to become
more salient.

But different parts of the moral code become salient to different
groups; since they receive different benefits from the technology,
the “moral problem” tends to be experienced differently by each.
Specifically, those whose relationship to the technology advantages
them are more disposed to view questions of moral 7 neaning fulness
as important. Conversely, those less advantaged with respect to the
technology tend- to place greater emphasis on improving their

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 283

access to the gratifications it can provide, and to raise questions con-
cerning the morality of allocation. In some measure, the disad-
vantaged seek to defend their claims in moral terms, and the ad-
vantaged, in turn, seek to protect their established positions in
similarly moral terms. Both therefore are inclined to stress the
importance of morality, but with different ends in view; each tends
to stress the moral components that sanction their own claims. The
disadvantaged stress the importance of justice, of equality, and of
such freedom as is needed to pursue their claims to improved
gratifications. The advantaged, for their part, tend to stress the im-
portance of order. Thus the endemic strain upon a moral code that
is exerted by the numerous changes attendant upon a developing
technology are further and acutely complicated by differential in-
terpretations given to the moral code by contesting groups.

With the Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, a fundamentally new situation was created in the relative
contribution that moral and nonmoral gratifications made to social
solidarity. The new technology immensely increased the impor-
tance of nonmoral gratification. At the same time, however, con-
tinuing and accelerating technological change has meant that the
relatively short-cycle changes that had hitherto been made to re-
adjust to small technological changes were no longer possible: they
were not made, in some part, because they could not be, shooting
as they would have to at a continually changing target; and, they
were not made, in some part, because they need not be, since the
technology kept on providing more solidarity-producing gratifica-
tions. There has, in consequence, been a growing hiatus between
the moral and technological sources of social solidarity in advanced
industrial nations. As Durkheim saw — but for different reasons —
the solidarity of industrial societies rests increasingly on nonmoral
gratifications: the role of the “collective conscience” has dimin-
ished.

Since the moral code of these nations is gravely attenuated and
continuously subjected to conflicting interpretations by those dif-
ferently advantaged, contention concerning the allocation of gratifi-
cations cannot be resolved by direct mutual negotiation. The inte-
gration of these societies depends increasingly upon the control
and mediation of conflicts from the state level. While the state can
and. does periodically deplore the decline of “moral fiber,” it can
mediate these conflicts with instrumental effectiveness only in two
ways: either through some development of its repressive apparatus,
moving in the direction of a "police-state,” and/or through the
manipulation of the technological fruits by income reallocations,
the Welfare State. In either case, the state apparatus is greatly
enlarged.

284 The World of Talcott Parsons

Moreover, all modern police-states also serve or promise to re-
distribute such gratifications, as Fascism and Nazism did. Corre-
spondingly, all Welfare States tend, with their welfare activities,
to coordinate new policing functions and to bolster more traditional
sources of “law and order.” It is all a question of proportions, but
these are vitally important, for they define, on the one hand, the
degree of “freedom” that the parties will have, to pursue redistribu-
tions congenial to themselves and, on the other, the extent to
which allocative problems will be solved by the acquisition of booty
through aggression and war.

From this standpoint it seems possible that the Soviet Union,
with the continuing improvements in its technology, will, in time,
move increasingly away from a repressive system of state control
and toward a Western type of Welfare State. At the same time,
however, there will be a corresponding decline in the influence of
the moral-ideological bases of the Soviet Union’s solidarity, with a
resultant growth of anxieties, particularly to those most advantaged
and socialized by its system; as a result, its transition to a Welfare
State will be neither frictionless nor swift.

While the American Welfare State is based upon the most pro-
ductive economy in the world, it is and will continue to be a deeply
ambivalent structure. For, in one part, it is oriented to a concern
to maintain social order and, in another, to a concern to do justice
and remedy inequality. The order-oriented component has real po-
tentiality for transition to a “police-state.” The equality- and justice-
oriented component must, in order to finance and supervise the
welfare process, concern itself with efficiency and accommodate
itself to the demands for fiscal economy from the order-oriented
component and from the private sector more generally. Although
much less drastically than a police-state, the Welfare State, then,
must continually intrude into privacy and the other traditional lib-
erties of both those who pay for and those who receive its bounty.
And this, in turn, will further sharpen certain of the strains in the
moral code.

The integration of American society in the foreseeable future
promises to rest increasingly upon the development of a technology'
that could, on the one hand, facilitate effective administrative
control by the state apparatus and, on the other, increase the gross
national product and thus permit increased individual gratifications
without changing the proportions allocated to different groups. The
two main internal contingencies in this development are: first, the
enormously disruptive impact that a serious economic depression
would have on a society thus maintained; second, the increasing
pressure for some total redefinition of the traditional moral code, a
pressure which may take the form of a new', mass social movement

The Moralistics of Talcott Parsons 285

for “cultural revitalization.” This last is already in evidence with
the emergence of the new psychedelic and communitarian counter-
cultures.

NOTES

X. The following survey figures are not reported in Sprehe’s doctoral dis-
sertation, cited previously; they were obtained from my own analysis of the
raw data.

2. For a fuller discussion, see my Introduction to E. Durkheim, Socialism
and Saint-Simon (New York: Collier Books, 1962).

3. See E. Shils, ‘The Calling of Sociology,” in Theories of Society, T.
Parsons, K. D. Naegle, and J. R. Pitts, eds. (New York: Free Press, 1961),

II, 1405-1448.

4. T. Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modem Society (New York: Free
Press, 1967), p. 398.

5. Ibid., p. 409.

6. Ibid., p. 406.

7. I bid., p. 398.

8. Ibid., p. 393.

9. Ibid., p. 399.

10. Ibid., p. 409.

XX. Ibid., p. 417.

12. Ibid., p. 394.

13. Ibid., p. 406.

14. Ibid., p. 409.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 408.

18. Ibid., p. 417.

19. Ibid., p. 398.

20. Ibid., p. 419.

21. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (New York: Schocken
Books, 1968).

22. Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books,
1966), p. 261.

23. The following statistics are not reported in Sprehe’s doctoral disserta-
tion, cited previously; they were obtained from my own analysis of the raw
data.

24. R. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1961), p. 17 x.

25. Marx’s Concept of Man, E. Fromm, ed. and T. Bottomore, trans. (New
York: Ungar, 1961), pp. 130-131.

26. And to use it with about as much truth as it had in his case.

27. S. Tompkins, “Psychology of Being Right — and Left,” Trans-action,

III, No. 1 (November-December 1965), pp. 23-27.

28. See M. Foucault, Les Mots et Les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966),
PP- 396 - 398 .

CHAPTER

Parsons on Power and PPealth

In his 1937 The Structure of Social Action, Parsons treated the role
of “force” in social life as a marginal and residual problem, allow-
ing it four pages (p. 288 ff.) in a volume of nearly eight hundred
pages. While this would be a patent absurdity today, several wars
and more than 200,000,000 deaths later, in 1937 it was character-
istic of most American sociologists. Until quite recently, most of
them had practically nothing to say about war or internal violence
except under the nonpolitical rubric of crime and “deviance.”

Parsons’ treatment of force in 1937 emerges in his discussion of
Pareto’s emphasis on the role of force and fraud in social life,
which, says Parsons, leads people of liberal “antecedents” to criti-
cize Pareto’s work for having a Machiavellian cast. “To avoid mis-
understanding,” Parsons points out that there was, for Pareto, an
association between force and idealism: “the man of strong faith
turns readily to force.” In short, the use of force sometimes testifies
to the existence of a powerful moral impulse and thus to the via-
bility of what is, for Parsons, the single most important source of
social integration. Force, therefore, cannot be all bad.

Far more realistic than many academic sociologists of this
period. Parsons then shrewdly observes that “the role and signifi-
cance of both [force and fraud] has undoubtedly been seriously
minimized by the liberal’ theories of progress and linear evolu-
tion.” While they are a symptom of the breakdown of moral re-
strictions on ways of getting things done, and are for Parsons to
that extent unwelcome, still force, unlike fraud, “frequently attends
the ‘creative’ process by which a new value system becomes estab-

286

Parsons on Power and Wealth 287

lished in a society through the succession to power of a new elite.”
Parsons thus sees force as being “midwife” to the new value system
that may reintegrate society, and not as inherently egoistical as
fraud tends to be. 1 Moreover, force is used by the state “as a means
of enforcing commonly accepted rules.” Constrained to choose,
Parsons — unlike Goffman — aligns himself with the “lions” rather
than the “foxes.”

In 1940 Parsons formulated his “Analytic Approach to the
Theory of Social Stratification,”- in which stratification is conceived
of as the “differential ranking of the human individuals who com-
pose a given social system” for which a moral sanction is claimed. 3
Among the six “bases of differential valuation” that Parsons men-
tions here, the sixth and last, acknowledged by him as a “residual
category,” is power. In 1953 Parsons published an extensive revi-
sion of this paper, which outlines his new thinking about the prob-
lem and then applies it to the American system of stratification. 4

The paper begins by stressing certain general points. For ex-
ample, that "social stratification is a generalized aspect of the
structure of all social systems” and is thus universal. Second, that
“it is a condition of the stability of social systems that there should
be an integration of the value-standards of the component units to
constitute a .‘common value system,’ ” and that “stratification in its
valuational aspect ... is the ranking of units in a social system in
accordance with the standards of the common value system.” 5 In
other words, while acknowledging that stratification as evaluation
is stratification seen from only one limited perspective, specifically,
in relation to the shared moral code, Parsons, nonetheless, chooses
to emphasize this one aspect of it. Here, power is regarded as the
“actual state of affairs,” in contrast to the normatively defined ideal
ranking in value terms." Power, Parsons then explicates, “is the
realistic capacity of a system-unit to . . . attain goals, prevent un-
desired interference, command respect, control possessions, etcet-
era,” that is, in Parsons’ terms, to actualize interests.

The ideological character of Parsons’ theory of stratification
becomes increasingly manifest in this 1953 paper. In 1940, when
still within the shadow of the Great Depression, Parsons had con-
ceded that “in a business economy the immediate end of business
policy must, in the nature of the case, be to improve the financial
status of the enterprise . . . the earnings of the business have be-
come the principal criterion of its success. 7 But if in 1940 Parsons
had acknowledged that the aim of business was profit, by 1953 his
emphasis came to be placed upon “productivity;” he then holds that
American society gives first place, in its value emphases, to the
contribution that units make “to the production of valued facili-
ties . . . whatever these may be. . . . This puts the primary emphasis

288 The: World of Talcott Parsons

on productive activity in the economy.” 8 Profit thus disappears as the
"principal criterion” of enterprise success, vanishing into the con-
ceptual recesses of various “valued facilities.”

The image of the American system of stratification that emerges
in the 1953 paper is as follows. It is, above all, a system dedicated
to the improvement of productivity. It is also “individualistic” (in
the sense of a “pluralism of goals”), in that its concern is with
“the production of valued facilities for unit-goals, whatever, within
the permissible limits, these may be.” 0 This sounds suspiciously
like a backhanded way of asserting the cultural dominance of the
very utilitarianism that Parsons had, in The Structure of Social
Action, been at pains to criticize. While there is no one overriding
goal to which the system as a whole is committed, Parsons adds
that there is a primary system goal, namely, “the maximization of
the production of valued possessions and cultural accomplish-
ments.” This formulation raises science and technology into a
prominence equal to that of possessions, like property and wealth,
as objectives of the society. Parsons, however, does acknowledge
that interest in science and technology' is a consequence of their
contribution to productivity and thus that this interest “is derivative
rather than primary.” 10 In short, science is commonly seen in our
culture from an instrumental and “applied” perspective.

American society is also regarded as placing an unusually strong
stress on "equality of opportunity” and thus on the conditions
requisite for it, namely, health and education. This, in turn, is seen
to entail a measure of government involvement, so that health and
education should not depend entirely on an ability to pay for them.
Here, Parsons emphasizes that increased governmental action is
now a “necessity” that derives most strongly from “the present
position of high responsibility of the United States in the world.” 11
It is not at all clear from Parsons’ statement, however, who has
placed this global responsibility upon the United States, or, indeed,
whether increased American involvement abroad is at all a moral
"responsibility” rather than an imperial ambition. In any event,
Parsons has here become an exponent of American Destiny.

Parsons also maintains that, in the occupational system, “status
is a function of the individual’s productive ‘contribution’ to the
functions of the organizations concerned.” 1 - Status therefore de-
pends on capacities and achievements on behalf of the organization.
“Of course,” acknowledges Parsons, “there are innumerable ways
in which it fails to work out,” for differences in power based on
differential command of possessions increase discrepancies be-
tween contribution and status. These discrepancies, he reassures
us, are, however, “secondary from the point of view of the broad
characterization of our stratification system.” 13

Parsons on Power and Wealth

289

"Our system of stratification,” holds Parsons, “revolves mainly
about the integration between kinship and the occupational sys-
tem,” 14 family income and status* being derivative of occupational
earning and position. (Equal emphasis is not, however, given to
the reality of the converse, where occupational earning and posi-
tion are derivatives of family income and status.) There is no fixed,
unambiguous class system in the United States, says Parsons,
hardly any development of an hereditary upper class, no clear-cut
hierarchy of prestige, considerable mobility between groups, and
much tolerance for diverse avenues to success. 15 As a result of the
American tax system as well as of the separation between manage-
ment and ownership, there is no American elite whose position is
family-transmitted. The American elite is open and shifting.

Lines between classes are blurred at all levels of the hierarchy.
As a result of automation, "it looks very much as though the tra-
ditional “bottom’ of the occupational pyramid was in [the] course
of almost disappearing.” 10 The enormous increase in the produc-
tivity of the American economy is a “big positive opportunity-
producing factor,” 17 and, in effect, now serves as a substitute for
the closed frontier. The main source of upward social mobility is
not access to possessions but to college. For those in metropolitan
areas, who can live at home while attending college, “the economic
difficulties of going to college are not the principal barriers even
for those from relatively low-income families . . . the available
evidence suggests that it is less important than is generally sup-
posed.” In accounting for the failure of some to achieve upward
mobility through education, Parsons therefore stresses that “an un-
expectedly heavy emphasis falls on the factor of motivation to
mobility ... as distinguished from objective economic opportunity
for mobility.” 18 In short, upward mobility now presumably depends
largely on education, and education on ambition, or “git up and git.”

In sum, in 1953 Parsons looked upon his American system and
found it good. While acknowledging certain “discrepancies” be-
tween achievement and reward, he holds these to be of “secondary”
importance; while observing the discriminated position of the
Black population, he has confidence that it will, in good time, be
remedied through the inexorable working of universalistic values
with their stress upon equality of opportunity; while noting that
science and education are subordinated to utilitarian purposes and
to enhancing productivity, he finds this no cause for indignation.
While not perfect, it is perfectly clear that, from Parsons’ stand-
point, ours is the best of all possible social worlds.

Although many important problems in Parsons’ analysis remain,
and I shall return to some of them later, here I simply want to
comment on a curious anomaly in Parsons’ moral posture, in his

29° The World of Talcott Parsons

“m oralis tics.” Parsons’ fundamental vision requires systematic and
repeated affirmation of the importance of looking at the social
world in relation to its moral code. And Parsons does this ceaselessly.
Yet the differences that he observes between reality and morality
never disturb and certainly never outrage him; they are, for him,
always temporary discrepancies, secondary aberrations, marginal
deviations of no consequences in the larger scheme of things. Par-
sons is a rare creature: the contented moralist. And for all his talk
about the “voluntaristic” component, Parsons’ own behavior clearly
reveals that moral values do not always lead to energetic striving
on their behalf, but may, on the contrary, induce a smug satisfac-
tion with things as they are. His moralistics consistently takes the
form of piety, of apology for rather than criticism of the status quo.
Parsons persistently sees the partly filled glass of water as half-full
rather than half-empty.

Essentially Parsons accomplishes this by absorbing reality into
morality, focusing only on those aspects of reality that coincide
with morality, as, for example, when, in his revised theory of social
stratification, he tells us blandly that he shall be concerned pri-
marily with its “valuational aspect.” Part of the reason for this is
that Parsons’ metaphysics stresses the coextensivity of morality
and reality. He really doubts the fundamental reality of the non-
moral. There is thus a surprisingly strong Platonic component in
Parsons; both focus on order, morality, hierarchy, and, as we shall
see, in the last resort, on “force.” These metaphysics emerge with
even greater clarity, if that is possible, in Parsons’ subsequent
analysis of power.

THE PROBLEMATICS OF POWER

In 1961 and 1962 Parsons turned, for the first time, to a fully
systematic discussion of both force and power, apparently prompted
by a conference called to discuss guerrilla and counterinsurgency
warfare. It then seemed as if American “responsibilities” abroad
were about to lead Parsons to a new interest in power and thereby
remove its. residual character in his theory. As we shall see, how-
ever, nothing of the sort happened.

These new analyses of power centered on a detailed and, in-
deed, an elaborate discussion of "the polity as a societal subsystem

Parsons on Power and Wealth 291

theoretically parallel to the economy,” 19 in which: (1) imputed
characteristics of the economy are, presumably, used as a basis to
develop a theory of power, and (2) power is treated as analogous
in the polity to money in the economy, and where (3) power is
therefore viewed as a generalized medium of interchange in the
polity, that is, “as a circulating medium,” and therefore (4) the
focus is not on who has how much power relative to others or on
the consequences of such power differences, but where (5) power,
like money, is seen as an “input” that can be combined with other
elements to produce certain kinds of “outputs” useful to the system
as a whole.

From Parsons’ standpoint power is now to be viewed as a “gen-
eralized capacity to secure the performance of binding obligations
by units in a system of collective organization, when the obligations
are legitimized with reference to their bearing on collective goals
and where, in the case of recalcitrance, there is a presumption of
enforcement by negative situational sanctions.” 20 His requirement
that, for power to be power it must be “generalized,” stems, as far
as I can see, simply from the analogy with money; in any event, and
like his other inferences from the analogy, it produces no theoreti-
cal consequences of any significance or originality. The focus on
legitimacy is, for its part, typical of Parsons’ abiding emphasis on
the integrative importance of morality, and is not derived from the
analogy with the economy or with money.

Parsons stresses that “securing compliance with a wish . . .
simply by threat of superior force, is not an exercise of power.”
Parsons’ systematic discussion of power, then, is not really con-
cerned with all forms of power but, at most, with only one kind,
namely, the “institutionalized power system” which secures con-
formity to obligations deemed legitimate by reason of their im-
puted contribution to collective goals. In short. Parsons is concerned
primarily with morally sanctioned power, and not at all with power
as it has been commonly understood by most political scientists
and sociologists.

Indeed, Parsons himself acknowledges, “most political theorists
would draw the line differently,” 21 because they regard threats of
superior force as exercises of power. Parsons might have added, in
candor, that he now not only disagrees with other theorists but also
with his own earlier position on the character of power. For, in his
1940 paper Parsons had expressly stated that “a person possesses
power only insofar as his “ability to influence others and his ability
to achieve or secure possessions are not institutionally sanctioned .” 22
In 1962 Parsons has, in effect, chosen to talk about something else,
something different from what most social theorists regard as

29 2 The World of Talcott Parsons

power. He has chosen, we might say, to confine himself to a dis-
cussion of “establishment power,” power used in, by, and for estab-
lished social systems and established elites.

Parsons might hold that his idiosyncratic conception of power
should be appraised in terms of the theoretical consequences that
it yields. In my judgment, his entire analysis of power, with its
central and repeated analogy with money, yields consequences of
absolutely no intellectual significance. Thus, for example, Parsons
concludes, on the basis of this analogy, that "force” bears the same
relation to power as gold bullion bears to money, that force is a
reserve on which the system can fall back in case other measures
fail. In short, it is the ultimate deterrent, the instrument of last
resort in a "showdown.” It would hardly seem that his elaborate
discussion and analogy are justified by this banality or by the
others that it yields. For example, he tells us that "the danger of
war is endemic in uninstitutionalized relations between territorially
organized collectivities.’- 3 In other words, there is always a danger
of war between sovereign states. In a similarly enlightening vein,
Parsons remarks that it is not the possession of weaponry or the
threat to use it that is the "principal 'cause’ of war.” Never have
theoretical mountains labored harder to produce tinier and grayer
mice.

The utter speciousness and uselessness of Parsons’ analogy with
money is evidenced by the fact that his conception of force as an
instrument of "last resort” was formulated as early as 1941 and in
total independence of that analog)': though "force is not the only
or even in any general way the most important or effective means
of controlling others, under certain circumstances it is the last
resort.” 21 The really significant questions about force, namely, who
has routine access to it and on behalf of which interests, remains
unexamined in both the early and later versions of Parsons’ theory.

To return, nevertheless, to the theory itself, we recall that in-
trinsic to Parsons’ conception of power is legitimacy: “the threat of
coercive measures, or of compulsion, without legitimation or justifi-
cation, should not properly be called the use of power at all,. but is
the limiting case where power . . . merges into an intrinsic instru-
1 mentality of securing compliance with wishes, rather than obliga-
tions.” 25 Here, Parsons’ response to the split between power and
morality is, primarily, to deny or minimize its significance and
reality; shoving it over into a corner of his attention, he gives it
only an occasional glance.

For Parsons, tire normal case is one in which the use of coercion
is justified, thus providing a vivid demonstration of how it is pos-
sible to be both empirically correct and intellectually absurd. Par-
sons is empirically correct, in that even the most brutal exercises

Parsons on Power and Wealth 293

of coercion are commonly held to be justified by those committing
them. The Nazi invasion of Europe and slaughter of the Jews was,
indeed, justified, by the Nazis. His position is intellectually absurd,
however, because he does not specify who must regard coercion
as justified, before it can be defined as "true’’ Parsons-1962-typc
power. Since practically everyone regards his own use of coercion
as justified, pure coercion and compulsion will be rare indeed: all
will be “power.” While Parsons sees that power entails the means
of acquiring legitimacy, he fails to see that this does not simply
imply access to “sanctifying” agencies, much less the making of
claims to obedience on grounds that others regard as independently
valid and would normally acknowledge. He fails to see the literal
sense in which coercion, violence, force, and all forms of might
make right. He fails to see that might creates its own legitimation
and is not merely willingly "exchanged” for it.

Those who obey because they are afraid do not like to think
themselves unmanly or cowardly; in an effort to maintain a decent
regard for themselves, the fearful frequently find ingenious ways
in which they can define almost any demand made upon them as
legitimate. Correspondingly, those demanding obedience often dis-
like viewing themselves as engaged in an unmanly brutalization of
the weak; to maintain a decent regard for themselves, they use all
the resources at their command to convince others that they are
justified in their brutality. Legitimacy, in short, may be bom of a
tacit alliance and trade-off between the criminal and his victim:
the victim conceals his impotence by acknowledging the legitimacy
of the claims made upon him, while the criminal conceals his
brutality by forcing his victim to acknowledge the legitimacy of his
claims. Thus are power and morality brought into equilibrium.
This is not to deny a potentially significant autonomy to moral
considerations; it is simply to insist on the fully reciprocal nature
of their relations to power. Like any other behavior, the judgment
that something is legitimate can be coerced and rewarded situa-
tionally.

Power will often, but not always, be defined as legitimate by
those exposed to its most brutal forms, because a perceived malinte-
gration between power and morality generates anxiety and, in
turn, a dissonance-reducing drive. The chasm of meaninglessness
must be closed. Precisely because power may be so brutal, men will
strive to believe that it is not morally irrelevant. Yet simply to
define power as legitimate, as Parsons does, is an exercise in con-
ceptual license as futile as it is sterile. Parsons’ extension of the
sovereign domain of morality is an inverse form of Machiavellian-
ism. It is one more indication of the fact that the theorist lives in
the same constraining world as those he theorizes about, and has

294 The World of Talcott Parsons

their common need to reduce the dissonance between power and
morality.

In the formulations above, it may seem as if I am talking only
about the manner in which extreme threat — the “last resort” of
force — generates a readiness to obedience that is rationalized in
other, more moral terms. It is not only, however, when power is
brutal and not only when it is poised to express itself as force, that
its presence is sensed in social relationships and generates motives
for willing obedience. Power also exists quietly, as it were, and is
fully real even at the lower ranges of intensity. It makes its pres-
ence felt continuously, underneath and alongside of. “legitimacy”
and all moral motives for obedience. In some of his formulations,
Parsons, like many other sociologists, seems on occasion to regard
power and “authority,” or morally legitimated power, in two ways :
either as two different stages in development, in which, for in-
stance, power is viewed as the degenerate or the immature form
of authority; or as two alternative ways in which one person or
group can structure the behavior of others. In both cases they are
viewed as mutually exclusive, as if, when one exists, the other does
not.

This image is misleading. It exists largely because power and
authority are being looked at from the standpoint of superordinates,
those on top. If it had been looked at from the standpoint of
svbordinates in the social world, power and authority would more
likely be viewed as dual structures, both simultaneously present,
in subtle and continual interaction. Power, in short, exists not
simply when authority breaks down or before authority has had a
chance to mature. It exists as a factor in the lives of subordinates,
shaping their behavior and beliefs, at every moment of their rela-
tions with those above them. Attitudes toward their superiors are
continually influenced by the awareness — sometimes focal and
sometimes only subsidiary — that superiors can give or withhold
at will things that men greatly want, quite apart from their own
agreement or consent, and that crucial gratifications depend upon
allocations and decisions by their superiors. It is the sheer ability
of the powerful to do this, quite apart from their right to do so, that
is an independent, ever-present element in the servile attitudes
that subordinates often develop toward their superiors. Legitimacy
and “authority” never eliminate power,- they merely defocali ze it,
make it latent. How could “authority” eliminate power when author-
ity is not merely some unanchored ‘'legitimacy,” but the legitimacy
of power ?

The extreme displays of power, or the “last resorts” of force,
even when directed toward others, and, indeed, toward others
whom one may believe “deserve” it, serve as symbolic reminders

Parsons on Power and Wealth 295

that power is continuously present in the lives of all. The occa-
sional lynching of - a Black, the occasional firing of an employee,
the occasional parental flare of temper toward the child, the occa-
sional punch in the nose, all — however occasional, and even
though aimed at someone else — remind men that there are limits.
The exercise of the “last resort” is the symbol of a continuing
presence; the mild, routine exercises of power are chastening re-
minders of the availability of nonroutine last resorts.

Utopian as his analysis frequently is, there are moments when
Parsons’ discussions of power and force threaten to be realistic.
For example, he sees that even institutionalized power has its
limits and vulnerabilities. He thus remarks that the obligations of
power, like the obligations of a banker, are always larger than it
can fulfill at any one moment. If the demands made on power, he
says, are too rapid, it can become “insolvent.” Yet this is a warning
not only that power can be broken, but also that it can be terrible.
“At the end of the road,” warns Parsons, “lies the resort to force in
the interest of what particular groups conceive to be their rights.” 20
This comes down to saying that, pressed too fast and too hard, the
system will bloody those who insist on demanding their rights.
Presumably, therefore, claimants must seek justice slowly and
gradualistically, lest they provoke the powerful to the wrathful use
of “extreme” measures.

It is notable that it is only here, with respect to the extreme
resort to force, but not with regard to the routine exercise of power,
that Parsons speaks of “what particular groups conceive to be their
rights.” For, if the routine, institutionalized exercise of power were
seen in this relativistic manner, it would imply that power inher-
ently entails a tendentious self-interest. And this would be funda-
mentally incompatible with Parsons’ ideologically compulsive con-
ception of power as that which disinterestedly serves not partisan
but collective goals.

In maintaining that men who demand that “power” fulfill its
legitimate obligations “too rapidly” can undermine a power system,
Parsons tacitly assumes that “power” normally fails to discharge
certain of its obligations, or leaves them unmet. Surely this implies
that power is normally in arrears in meeting its moral obligations.
This, in turn, implies that, far from being mutually adjusted, there
is usually some tension between power and morality. This implica-
tion fails to be made explicit, however, because it contradicts Par-
sons’ basic emphasis on the coextensivity of power and morality.

Once the moral defaults of power are made focal, then the next
question inevitably becomes: Whose legitimate claims are being
met and whose are being ignored? Will it be assumed that the
moral defaults of power are random, relative to all actors in a

296 The World of Talcott Parsons

social system, or are these defaults in some way patterned and
skewed? Parsons absolutely must maintain that they are random
and not patterned. He must, that is, maintain that the chances
that power will slight the legitimate claims or rights of actors de-
pends in no way upon their position in the social system, or upon
their power itself. Should he admit that the moral defaults of
power are related to the very power that people have, then his
fundamental conception of power as disinterestedly serving non-
partisan collective interests collapses utterly. At this point, there-
fore, Parsons’ fall into realism must and does stop.

What Parsons must ignore is how the possession of power itself
enables some to default on their moral obligations; how the lack
of power constrains others to accept less than they might legiti-
mately claim; and how this very default of morality is itself estab-
lished as customary on the basis of the power distribution. In short,
what Parsons must ignore is what I will call “normalized repres-
sion.”

Every social system entails some degree of failure to conform
with the full requirements of its moral code. There is always some
latitude in what is taken to be acceptable conformity with the
requirements of any moral value; but this will vary considerably,
depending upon whether the persons judging it are those giving or
those receiving such compliance with the moral code and upon
their power relation to one another. One reason for this universal
disparity between moral principle and customary practice is that,
often, those who profess a given value do not, and never did, be-
lieve in it, at least in anything like the generalized manner in which
it came to be formulated publicly. Men often experience neither
guilt nor embarrassment at doing less than a value requires, be-
cause they were never committed to all that it prescribed. Values
are continually susceptible to attenuation in practice, because
people frequently are induced to promise performances that they
do not want, and perhaps never intended, to keep. This disparity
between values and “wants” leads to a gap between principle and
practice, which, in time, attains a kind of equilibrium in custom
and usage. The young are socialized to expect its occurrence. To
demand full compliance, they are told, is impractical, unrealistic,
and naive.

Yet not all are able to default with equal impunity on their moral
obligations. Some pay more costs, others less. Some hang for steal-
ing the goose from off the commons; others steal the commons
from under the goose without penalty. While a set of moral values
may be shared in common, men are not equally interested in all
moral values, and the power to enforce moral claims is never
equally distributed. The level at which moral default comes to be

Parsons on Power and Wealth

stabilized is, in large part, determined by the relative power of the
groups involved. The more powerful are, in consequence, both
ready and able to institutionalize compliance with the moral code
at levels congenial to themselves and more costly to those with
less power. Power is, among other things, just this ability to en-
force one’s moral claims. The powerful can thus conventionalize
their moral defaults. As their moral failure becomes customary and
expected, this itself becomes another justification for giving the
subordinate group less than it might theoretically claim under the
group’s common values. It becomes, in short, “normalized repres-
sion.”

If morality seems coextensive with power, it is not only because
power influences the levels at which conformity to moral values
becomes conventionalized, but also because power can actually
shape the definition of u>hat is moral (and, indeed, of what is
“real”). For, in any given case, what is moral is often uncertain,
frequently disputed, and invariably resolved in a situation where
some have more power than others. Those with more power there-
fore exert more influence in determining which moral rule applies
and what a rule means in any given case. That is, they define what
is moral. Morality fits power, therefore, because the powerful have
the Procrustean ability to mold morality. While not creating the
moral code out of whole cloth, they can cut and tailor it to suit
themselves.

MAKING AMERICAN SOCIETY WHOLE:
T1IE IMPORTANCE OF BEING RICH

In a society with democratic values, where the principle is “one
man, one vote,” and w T here it is held that a man’s reward should
depend on his contribution, the position of the “rich" is an
anomalous one. Since it is at variance with the values publicly
affirmed, their exceptional power and privilege must be muted. A
public charade is therefore often played, in which people act as if
there were no one here except “middle-class” people, and being rich
is treated as if it had no special consequences. Being “rich,” then,
often comes to be a latent identity.

The importance of being rich largely disappears in Parsons’
mythos of the franchise. He tells us that, in the “largest and most
highly differentiated systems . . . the most ‘advanced’ national

2-q8 The World of Talcott Parsons

societies, the power element has been systematically equalized
through the device of the franchise”; and he adds that "the same
basic principle of one member, one vote, is institutionalized in a
vast number of voluntary associations.” Moreover, “equality of
power through the franchise is so great empirically that the ques-
tion of how it is grounded in the structure of social systems is a
crucial one.” 27 It is characteristic of Parsons’ moralistics that he
finds this grounding in a value principle, universalis m, which in-
volves treating people of the same merits or demerits in the same
manner. It is equally characteristic that he makes no mention of
the many bitter struggles that took place, from Chartism onwards,
to extend the franchise to the working class, to women, to the
Blacks, and of how these were won only against the bitter resist-
ance of the propertied and prejudiced. Somehow the universalistic
value principles of the rich have frequently and mysteriously not
led them voluntarily to honor the principle of one man, one vote.

Again, Parsons rather typically makes no mention of the fact
that, though this principle is “institutionalized in a vast number
of voluntary associations,” this has not prevented practically all of
them from being ruled by oligarchies. Parsons’ essay on power
might well have begun by asking, “Who now reads Robert Michels?”
It is only the empirical importance of the principle of equality,
not, in Parsons’ view, its continuous and routine violation in com-
mon practice that is worth mentioning. That men in the “advanced”
countries are born enfranchised but everywhere live under oli-
garchies neither perturbs nor puzzles Parsons deeply.

It is noteworthy that in the mid-i 940’s and in the 1950’s there
was much discussion among sociologists interested in organiza-
tional analysis and political sociology — for example, Philip Selz-
nick, S. M. Lipset. and myself — of the problem of oligarchy, that
is, the rule of the few. Much of the controversy centered on
Michels’ "iron law” formulation, which sees oligarchy as an in-
evitable, though perhaps, “unanticipated” consequence of internal
organizational imperatives. The issue was, in part, one of pes-
simism versus optimism concerning the possibility of successful
social change in democratic directions and with democratic means.
The Michelsians, of course, were pessimistic, and others of us op-
posed them largely because they seemed to preclude democratic
change. Michelsian pessimism concerning oligarchy was then
congenial to socialists disillusioned with the Soviet Union and,
more generally, hostile to those who they felt encouraged “utopian”
and unrealistic expectations of social change. Disagreement tended
to focus on the causes of oligarchy. It pitted those who stressed the
origins of oligarchy in characteristics common to all organizations,
and who were therefore rather pessimistic, against those of us who

300 The World of Talcott Parsons

universalistic value principles, the rich properly accept the "very
strictly binding” consequences of equality under the franchise. The
“rich” therefore receive no special mention — indeed, hardly any
mention at all — in Parsons’ elaborate and spacious discussion of
power. They merely do not appear. Parsons’ political sociolog)'
keeps them invisible. The rich are a very “latent identity” indeed, as
embarrassing to Parsons’ esoteric sociological theory as they are
to the commonplace political ideology that it embodies. Like Ernest
Hemingway, Parsons believes that the rich are like everyone else,
in relation to the power system of advanced nations: they have
been “systematically equalized.”

For my part, I am confident that it was not Hemingway but F.
Scott Fitzgerald who was right on this matter: the rich are differ-
ent. They are not just like everyone else. They are certainly not
about to limit their political power to that which the principle, one
man, one vote, allows them, nor need they do so. What the “exten-
sion” of the franchise has meant is that the rich continue to exert
power, far beyond their votes and numbers, largely through non-
parliamentary or noncongressional means, just as they always
have.

The rich exercise power, including political power, though not
by voting and not by getting elected to office. They do it in these
ways: primarily through their control of great foundations, with
their policy-shaping studies and conferences and their support for
universities; through a variety of interlocking national associations,
councils, and committees that act as legislative lobbies and as in-
fluences upon public opinion; through their membership among
the trustees of great universities; through their influence on im-
portant newspapers, magazines, and television networks, by virtue
of their advertising in them or their outright ownership of them,
which, as Morris Janowitz once observed, sets “the limits within
which public debate on controversial issues takes place”; through
their extensive and disproportionate membership in the executive
branch of the government, their financial contributions to political
parties, their incumbency in major diplomatic posts; and through
their control of the most important legal, public relations, and
advertising firms. Granted that these observations are in no way
as original as Parsons’ observation that force is an instrument of
last resort. Nonetheless, they still bring us close to the most im-
portant problems in the analysis of a business society’s class sys-
tem, and help us to see certain fundamental difficulties in Parsons’
treatment of it.

In his 1940 paper on stratification, Parsons insists that wealth
is only secondarily a criterion of status — that is, one is given
approval or prestige not primarily because one has wealth but,

Parsons on Power and Wealth

3 01

rather, because wealth has “primary significance ... as a symbol of
achievement.” That is, Parsons holds that a capitalist society
stresses the value of achievement and therefore gives wealth in
recognition of and, indeed, in proportion to achievement. Here one
might have paused briefly to wonder why it was, and what it
meant, that a society with such a strong pecuniary concern should
be so reluctant to award approval or prestige simply for wealth
alone. Why does it not openly honor the rich in the same fulsome
way that ancient Greece awarded prestige for sheer physical prow-
ess in war? While Parsons understates the extent to which sheer
wealth has, in fact, always been a basis on which prestige has been
awarded, he is, I believe, correct in noting that there is a certain
embarrassment in doing so. The “rich” are, in part, a latent identity.
The use of wealth as a criterion of status is not as open and easy
as might be expected in a business society such as our own.

Essentially this has to do with the fact that wealth itself, and
particularly differential wealth, has always been in need of justifica-
tion and legitimation, even in a middle-class and pecuniary society.
Commonly, even people in a middle-class society have been inter-
ested in knowing what gives the wealthy a right to their wealth.
Traditionally, the middle-class answer has argued that it is based
on their talent and individual achievements. In this vein. Parsons
remarks that wealth “owes its place as a criterion of status mainly
to its being an effect of business achievement .” 28 At any rate, this
has been the fundamental middle-class ideology.

Yet Parsons also acknowledges a certain “complicating” factor,
to wit, “inheritance of property.” In consequence of this, he must
admit that wealth “gains a certain independence so that the posses-
sor of wealth comes to claim a status and have it recognized, re-
gardless of whether or not he has the corresponding approved
achievement to his credit .” 29 But if wealth, as Parsons says, owes
its importance as a criterion of status to its association with
achievement, why should a claim to status, on the basis of in-
herited wealth alone, be acknowledged?

In his effort to explain this paradox. Parsons has to abandon
his most fundamental assumptions, which, being Functionalist,
would ordinarily lead him to search out the ongoing contributions
that a practice makes to a social system. Here, instead, he invokes
a pre-Functionalist explanation to account for the practice of hon-
oring the unaccomplished wealthy, characterizing it as a vestigial
“tradition.” Thus Parsons holds that “in our society . . . there is a
tradition of respect for birth and inherited wealth which has never
quite been extinguished.” But, why does this tradition persist ? In
particular, hmv can it persist if it is in flagrant violation of the so-
ciety’s dominant values, which, being “universalistic” and achieve-

302 The World of Talcott Parsons

ment-oriented, call for all rewards to be apportioned to specific
achievements?

The answer, of course, is that respect for inherited wealth and
the granting of status based upon it, is not an anomaly in capitalist
societies but is, rather, consistent with and supportive of its insti-
tutionalized pattern of property and inheritance. The inheritance
of wealth is intrinsic to the system of private property character-
istic of capitalism. On the principle that it is better to be wealthy
and secure than very wealthy and insecure, the rich have com-
promised with progressive taxation and with universalistic and
achievement values. They bend and compromise, but they do not
compromise themselves out of existence. To have any degree of
stability and legitimacy, a capitalist system must win some measure
of acceptance for its own distinctive principle, namely, that some
have a right to something for nothing, to approval and prestige
because of their sheer wealth alone. The system must mobilize
every resource at its command to prevent the violation and to
guarantee the acceptance of this principle.

But this principle contradicts universalism and achievement.
How this is possible, and why this is possible, are secondary issues.
The first and most important thing is to see that the contradiction
exists. And it is this — and the basic implication it entails — that
Parsons is most desperately laboring to avoid. He is trying to avoid
acknowledging that middle-class property is illegitimate from the
standpoint of important middle-class values; for, this might imply
that middle-class society has built into it a fundamental contradic-
tion between its property system and its cultural values that in-
herently unstabilizes its social system and undermines its moral
code. Stressing, as he does, the importance of morality for the
stability of a society, Parsons is caught in the contradiction of
maintaining that contemporary society is fundamentally sound,
even though its property system is at variance with its own moral
code.

Parsons argues tautologically that possessions or “facilities” are
optimally allocated when given to those who can use them most
effectively within and for the values relevant to the system in
question. He then transforms this into the statement that dif-
ferences in facilities (possessions) follow upon and correspond to
differences in the contributions people do make to the functioning
of the system, so that "the rank order of control of facilities should
tend to correspond to the rank order of the evaluation of unit-
function in the system.” 30 In short, possessions and prestige should
and do correspond, because both are given to those scarce indi-
viduals competent to use them on behalf of the social system as a

Parsons on Power and Wealth

303

whole. “Any lack of such correspondence,” Parsons reassures us, is
merely a “disturbing factor in the situation .” 31

This trivial “disturbing factor” turns out, on inspection, however,
to be nothing less than private property and inheritance. But
Parsons simply cannot acknowledge this in anything like its full
importance, for he expressly holds “that it is a condition of the
stable state of a [social] system that the reward system should tend
to follow the same rank order as the direct evaluation of units in
terms of their qualities and performances .” 32 In other words,
Parsons holds that the stability of a social system depends upon
“the principle ... of reward in proportion to ‘desert.’ ” 33 (Which,
of course, was exactly Plato’s point: That is, the stability of a
society depends upon doing “justice,” in the sense of giving a man
his due.) But since, as Parsons also acknowledges, “control of
possessions is inevitably correlated with high status ,” 34 those with
possessions continue to get their rewards regardless of whether or
not they earn them, and all the more so as the possessions them-
selves are inherited rather than earned. The modem development
of a separation between ownership and management in the cor-
poration sharpens the problem of the legitimacy of the rich.
Moreover, with the development of trust companies, which invest
inheritances (and help avoid inheritance taxes), it is now possible
for the rich to remain so, and, indeed, to grow richer, without
managing either production or investment enterprises. The rewards
of the rich then continue, without their having to lift a finger or
twitch a brain cell and without any correspondence to their con-
tribution or “deserts.” By Parsons’ own assumptions, therefore, a
business society fails to meet the requirements of a stable social
system as he himself has outlined them.

As will later be noted, Parsons is ready to acknowledge that our
family system, in which children share and inherit parental ad-
vantages without earning them, violates universalism. He acknowl-
edges that the “preservation of a functioning family system even
of our type is incompatible with complete ‘equality of opportunity.’ ”
But this acknowledgment too is ideologically distorted, for the
present family system is incompatible with anything remotely
approaching equality, let alone “complete” equality and opportunity.
The reference to “complete” equality simply serves to make the
existent disparity between the two seem inevitable and thus to
make the demand to reduce it seem unpractically idealistic. Yet
while Parsons acknowledges the incompatibility between the family
and the moral code, he is unable to acknowledge the same contra-
diction between private property and the moral code. The point, of
course, is that Parsons is not engaged in a polemic against Plato,
who was the first to see the full implications of the contradiction

304 The World of Talcott Parsons

between the family system and private property, but against Marx;
acknowledgment of the contradiction between property and the
moral code would undermine Parsons’ position here.

The fundamental dilemma that Parsons faces is that capitalism
does not comply with the requirements of a stable social system
as he himself has formulated them : for, how is it possible to main-
tain a willing mutual conformity to the common moral code on
which social equilibrium rests, according to Parsons, when the
code itself is violated by the property system and when some are
enormously wealthy and powerful by reason of property that they
have often inherited and never earned? When some are so much
more rich and powerful than others, is there not a continual pos-
sibility that they may, with relative impunity, ignore rather than
be sensitive to, and depart from rather than comply with, the
expectations of others? Is there not a continual temptation for
the rich and powerful to minimize compliance with their obliga-
tions and to maximize compliance with their rights, tnus exerting
a continuous strain on the “complementarity” of the social system
and increasing its exploitative patterns? Is there not a continual
inclination for them to rationalize, to equate the “needs” of the
collectivity with the vested interests inherent in their own ad-
vantaged position? And quite apart from their immediate interests,
is there not a continual tendency for the rich and the powerful to
make decisions not in terms of the needs of the collectivity or the
requirements of its moral code, but to protect their own capacity
to influence subsequent decisions?

TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF PROPERTY

It would be a mistake to believe that the differential and special
power of the rich derives only from the size of the resources they
have at their command, from what they can buy with or exchange
for these resources, or even from their prestige — be it earned or
unearned — in society. The power of the rich is most deeply rooted
in the nature of property itself, in the structure of property as an
institution, and in its relationship to social systems. To understand
the most crucial aspects of systems of social stratification it is
necessary to explore the nature of property institutions in society.

It is one of the most disturbing, though characteristic, aspects of
Parsons’ social theory that it has undertaken only the most super-

Parsons on Power and Wealth 305

ficial probing into the nature of property. Still. Parsons is, in this
respect, somewhat better than other Functionalists. 15 Thus when
Neil Smelser undertakes a brief but systematic analysis of the
Sociology of Economic Life™ meant as a serious and scholarly
work, he finds no occasion to present any sustained discussion of
the nature of property itself. And when Smelser and Parsons col-
laborate in their Economy and Society,™ or when Parsons considers
the issue by himself, the problem of property is presented in only
the most cursory manner. This is particularly noteworthy because
Parsons has always presented himself as a systematic and com-
prehensive theorist, concerned to consider all important variables,
and not limited by narrow, conventional definitions of what arc
appropriately "sociological” subjects for investigation. In what
follows, my attention will be primarily directed to one form of
property only, the private or individually owned, and specifically to
its implications for "social systems” as these are conceived of by
Parsons.

Insofar as Parsons, like other Functionalists, confronts the
analysis of property, he tends to stress its similarity to social role
behavior and to discover in it the kinds of “rights” that inhere in
any "social role." For example.

Property is a bundle of rights of possession, including above all that
of alienation ... in a highly differentiated institutional system, property
rights are focused on the valuation of utility, i.c , the economic signifi-
cance of the objects . . . the most important object of property comes to
be monetary assets, and specific objects arc valued as assets, that is, in
terms of potentials of marketability. Today . . . rights to money assets,
the ways in which these can be legitimately acquired and disposed of,
the ways in which the interests of other parties must be protected, have
come to constitute the core of the institution of property. 3 ''

In short, there has been a "monetization of property.” It would
seem that essentially what Parsons is talking of here is “bourgeois”
property.

To repeat: what Parsons has done, for the most part, is to
interpret property and possessions in terms of role theory; thus, in
Economy and Society he and Smelser remark that property is "the
institutionalization of rights in objects of possession or nonsocial
objects,” 33 which are used as production facilities or rewards to
the factors of production. Yet the relationship of the “possessor”
to the thing possessed differs from role relationships. In other
words, the relationship between possessor and possessed is not a
relationship of Ego to Alter, or of two role players, because an
Alter is a role player, not a thing. This is recognized in the following
insightful observation: “Put another way, the differences between

3°6 The World of Talcott Parsons

possession and occupatibn lie in the fact that things axe not ex-
pected to interact in the same way as persons.” 40

Where, then, are the mutuality and complementarity character-
istic of stable, social, Ego-Alter relationships? This is answered
with a homely example. “The expression ‘my hat’ refers not only
to the fact that I ‘have’ and am at liberty to wear a particular hat
at will, but also to the fact that others are, under most circum-
stances, restrained from taking possession of or using my hat
without my permission.” 41 In other words, Ego as “possessor” has
certain rights of use, control, and alienation over his hat (he can
sell it, give it to charity, or bequeath it to his nephew, Rameau);
to this right there corresponds a “restraint” upon Alter, which
means he cannot “steal” it or otherwise use it without permission
of its owner.

Presumably, then, possession is a “role” relationship, like any
other, in that it entails certain rights for those playing the role of
possessor vis-a-vis certain (unstipulated) others, who, in turn,
have corresponding, supposedly complementary obligations to the
possessor. The question, however, is whether this is, indeed, a
role relationship or a system of social interaction fundamentally
like any other, and whether a possessor is, in fact, a “role” whose
“rights” to use, control, or alienate the object he possesses are
rights like others found in role relationships, and, if so, with whom
does a possessor have a role relationship?

We may notice immediately that it is not said that “others” are
obligated not to take possession of Mr. Parsons’ hat without his
permission. What is said, rather, is that others are “restrained”
from doing so. Is this a slip of the tongue? I think not. The point
is that there is a very special consequence should others walk off
with Mr. Parsons’ hat; and there is a very special identity assigned
to them. They are reported to the police, tried in court, and put in
jail if convicted; they are called “thieves,” and their behavior is
called “stealing.”

In most social relations, however, this does not happen when
people fail to meet their obligations. One man may alienate the
affection and love of another’s wife, but neither the wife nor the
seducer is clapped into jail. A man may undermine the authority
of another, violate his obligations as a friend, lie, and cheat, and
misrepresent, all to his own advantage and all in flagrant violation
of the other’s role “rights.” For the most part, all that the injured
party can do is call upon his friends to rally round, ask that
onlookers observe the violation of the elementary decencies, and
seek the unorganized protection of his immediate community. (In
other words, the victim is in serious trouble.) In the normal course
of role relationships, one man can destroy the life work of another

Parsons on Pouter and Wealth 307

and, in the process, violate the most sacred role obligations, yet
he may at most be subject only to frowns, criticism, or loss of
reputation. But heaven help him should he deliberately walk off
with the other man’s hat. The police apparatus would be mobilized,
weapons inspected, warrants issued, jail keys turned.

Ownership, then, seems to have some very remarkable attributes,
which are not at all common to other social roles. In particular, it
has an ease of access to legal enforceability. The inviolability of
property rights is more closely monitored and protected by the legal
and state apparatus, in the normal course of events, than any other
“right” except that of protection from bodily harm. The use of the
state’s force to protect property is not at all an instrument of
“last resort,” but a routine method of enforcement- Normally, one
does not bargain, negotiate, remonstrate, or appeal to a thief; one
calls the police. This, implies something about the priorities that
the state assigns to the protection of property rights; but, more
than that, it implies something about the nature of the state itself.

There is another peculiaritv of property and property rights that
distinguishes “owners” from role players. Those playing social roles
are usually doing so in some relationship with another, focalized
role player. If one is an employee, husband, father, friend, one is
always an employee of some employer, husband of a wife, father
of a child, etcetera. Alter, the reciprocal role player, is always fully
evident as a member of the relationship in which Ego plays some
role and in which each rewards the other for conforming to his
rights. The characteristic thing about owners, however, is that their
culturally focalized relationship is not with another private person
or another role player, but rather with some thing or object; one
is owner of a house, a business, a patent. This is not to say that
propertv does not “implicate” an owner in some social relationship
with other private persons, for it does. But this relationship is only
implicit; such a relationship is normally only within an owner's
subsidiary attention, particularly insofar as his obligations are
concerned, unless the “others” violate what he takes to be his
rights. The basic effect of defining an object as someone’s “prop-
erty" is to exclude all others except the state; it establishes, by
prima facie definition, that others have no rights in this object
except insofar as the proprietor expressly permits them such rights.

Stated in other terms: the private “others” to whom one is
related as an “owner” constitute only a negative and residual social
identitv. Vis-a-vis an owner who has not expressly undertaken
obligations, all private persons are interchangeable "others.” There
is no point in distinguishing them from one another, for they all
stand in the same relation to the owner. All alike are commonly
excluded from the use and enjoyment of “his” property. This,

308 The World of Talcott Parsons

indeed, is the central consequence of establishing objects as private
property. Others thereby have no obligations of any positive sort to
the owner; they are not obliged to help him but only to avoid
intrusion on his rights. Correspondingly, an owner has no positive
obligations to help others, but only to avoid such uses of his
property as would intrude upon their rights.

The property relationship, then, is fundamentally one of mutual
avoidance and forbearance. Others, consequently, take on a.clear,
focal, and differentiated identity vis-a-vis an owner only when they
violate his rights (though' not when they respect and conform with
them) or when he employs his rights to make special promises to
certain others. It is primarily in the latter case that an owner and
others have positive rights and obligations to one another. But
such undertakings are not incumbent on an owner. And unless
such undertakings are specifically entered into, “others” do not
normally receive "rewards” for conforming to an owner’s rights,
but only punishments for violating them. In their most costly form,
these punishments are usually administered not by the owner
himself, but by a third party: the police, the courts, or, more
generally, the state.

Since there is no "social relationship” between an owner and
other private parties in the same sense that one exists between
two role players engaged in social interaction, an “owner” is not in
a social role in the conventional sociological sense. It is precisely
because of this that an owner is culturally defined as being in a
role relationship not to other -persons but to the object he owns.
This is how “possession” is normally viewed, or culturally focused
in our society; and, we may say, the “culture” knows whereof it
speaks. The most binding and continuous social relationship that
an owner as owner enters into is with those upon whom he relies to
protect his property rights — the agencies of the state — not with
merely private parties, whether they violate those rights or honor
them.

Indeed, with our strong cultural emphasis, which tends to define
property as a “sacred” and hence absolutely inalienable right, even
the state — as the Declaration of the Rights of Man expressly
indicated — cannot appropriate a man’s property without due proc-
ess and reimbursement. This means that the general presumption
is that possession is absolute, which is to say, noncontingent on
any performance by the owner; it does not require that he perform
certain obligations to others as the condition for the maintenance
of his property. Before he has entered into some contract, no party
other Rian the state has a claim upon an owner. And he has no
obligation to enter any contract.

An owner’s rights are therefore noncontingent in relation to all

Parsons on Power and Wealth 309

others except the state; they axe valid and enforceable quite apart
from any fulfillment of obligations to others and quite apart from
whether others believe they have obligations to the owner. In sum,
ownership does not in itself implicate an owner in any social rela-
tionship with any private parties that necessarily entails reciprocal
and complementary rights and obligations. To say that private
property exists in a society is to say that some considerable part of
the valuables in that society has been preempted by individuals
who have the legal right to exclude all others from their use, what-
ever their “need” may be. The net effect of ownership is to exclude
all other private parties from the use, control, or alienation of
certain objects, and to limit the claims that any role player may
make upon any other, regardless of the roles they have. Ownership
thus establishes the presumption that certain objects and the rights
to them are excluded from all social relationships, unless they
have been expressly included or are required by the state.

“Social space," then, may be conceived of as divided into two
types: one type consists of parcels or areas preempted by “owner-
ship,” the other of “free space” that has not been thus enclosed.
It is in the free social space that "social systems,” as they are
conceived by Parsons, arc established. A “social system” is therefore
a residual organization of social relationships, in that it may deal
with only those things that are "left over” after property rights
have been established. Such social systems as come to exist may
develop only in the free social spaces, the interstices that have not
been previously preempted by property rights. Property is an en-
cumbrance on social relations. It is a prior claim, or a claim treated
as prior, to those involved in the role relations that constitute
"social systems." Property constitutes the “givens” or the limiting
conditions for the construction and development of social systems
in the Parsonsian sense; to property, it is assumed, all else must
and will adapt. Properly is thus the infrastructure of social systems.

If "social systems” are social relationships entailing mutual
obligations and rights — a complementarity and reciprocity of obli-
gations and rights — then ownership does not constitute a social
system. Property is closely linked to the legal structure and the
state apparatus precisely because it does not necessarily implicate
the owner in a self-maintaining, spontaneous social system with
other private parties. Ownership as such does not obligate the
owner to other private parties: it does not obligate him to reward
those who respect his rights, and it inherently allows him certain
rights quite apart from what he does or provides for others. He
may thus secure conformity with his own rights in certain objects
without giving reciprocal conformity to the expectations of others.
The social relations established between owners and other private

310 The World of Talcott Parsons

parties thus cannot be stabilized by reason of their willing mutual
conformity.

Moreover, property rights differ from other kinds of role rights
in that they may be assigned, bequeathed, given, or sold to others.
An owner may assign his property rights to others unilaterally,
without the moral approval and permission of any other except
the state. If the state regards such a transfer as legal, no one else
need define it as morally justified in order for it to proceed. Hence,
property inherently entails power over others, the ability to achieve
certain aims despite their resistance.

The rights of owners, therefore, do not and cannot rely for their
protection upon the moral approval of other private parties, for it
is intrinsic to property rights that they are valid despite the absence
of such legitimacy. In consequence, they must and do find their
protection elsewhere, through their ability to invoke the aid of
third parties, specifically those in the state apparatus. This means
that the protection of property rests on access to and use of force,
not as a matter of last resort, but personally, directly, and routinely.
Even without involving the police or the state, one may personally
and immediately exercise “reasonable” force in the protection of
his property. The presumption is that the storeowner may shoot
to protect his cash register, and the householder to protect his
personal belongings. Since property as such does not require or
allow reciprocal and complementary expectations, or mutual rights
and obligations among private parties, it exists apart from a social
system whole stability relies upon men’s willing mutual conformity.
Indeed, property is essentially a mode of protecting advantage
without involvement in a self-maintaining social system, as Parsons
has conceived this.

In stressing that ownership as such does not implicate owners
in self-maintaining social systems, my point, of course, is not that
ownership does not constitute a social relationship of any sort; it
constitutes a very' distinctive kind of social relationship, one which
does not necessarily entail reciprocal and complementary rights and
obligations that might constitute a stable, self-maintaining social
system. It is precisely for this reason that private ownership is,
paradoxically, a social relationship in which owners have more
power than nonowners and, indeed, pow r er over nonowners, but in
which this power is inherently precarious, always vulnerable to
the threat of other private persons and vulnerable to the state
itself. This extreme vulnerability of private property is, in large
part, an intrinsic consequence of its being defensible apart from
self-maintaining social systems involving other private persons.
It is therefore a locus of endemic conflict in societies. Parsons
explicitly agrees on this point, even if he fails to see its full

Parsons on Power and Wealth 311

importance: “There is obviously a distributive aspect of wealth and
it is in a sense true that the wealth of one person or group by
definition cannot also be possessed by another. . . . Thus the distri-
bution of wealth is, in the nature of the case, a focus of conflict of
interest in a society.’ - '' 2

But again, it is not that private property cannot and does not
shape social systems or become a focus for their establishment.
It can and does do both, and this is part of what I imply in referring
to it as an infrastructure of social systems. Since private property
entails a monopolization of certain rights in objects, with a corre-
sponding exclusion of others, possession allows the proprietor to
give others contingent "easements” on the use and enjoyment of his
property, either by contract or informally. To possess, therefore, is
to have rights in valuable objects that may be used to initiate or
enter into social systems. The proprietor controls objects that may
gratify others and which he may therefore use to secure desired
performances from them. Property may thus be used to obligate
others to the owner, thereby establishing a social system. Thus
property need not only exclude others: it can also be used to
establish social solidarities. In particular, it allows the owner
initiative in establishing social systems centering on and advan-
tageous to himself, especially as his rights are anchored in and
protected by the state apparatus outside that social system.

The use of objects in common is one of the ways in which the
very boundaries of social systems are established and determinable.
This implies that owners may determine or shape the boundaries of
social systems; for. to the degree that an owner determines who
may use or enjoy certain objects, he is free to determine who are
and are not members of the particular social system, as well as
their function and status in it, for both function and status are
importantly definable in terms of access to and use of objects.
Indeed, in some part, what defines a group is its common access to
and use of a concrete set of objects. The solidarity of a family, for
example, is importantly influenced by the fact that its members
have special access to the use and enjoyment of many objects,
a common obligation to protect them from outsiders, and a special
expectation of inheritance.

Insofar as men can enter into and establish stable social systems
only by fulfilling certain obligations which provide others with
gratification, it may be noted that there are two ways in which this
can be done. One is by undertaking certain personal performances
for others, using skill and time; the other is by using property,
which is to say, allowing others to have certain uses or control of
one’s objects. In the former instance, where personal service or
performance is used to discharge or to create obligations, this is

312 The World of Talcott Parsons

subject to limitations of time. The capacity to do as others desire
through the performance of a personal service is limited to the
twenty-four hours in a day. Capacity to do as others desire by
allowing them access to one’s property is not, however, limited by
time, but only by the size of these property holdings. The ability to
meet or to create obligations through the employment of property
is, therefore, practically unlimited. One’s ability to establish and to
participate in social systems, the power that they have and the
power that one has in them, are thus a function of one’s property.
Clearly, “ownership” entails an enormous capacity to generate
social systems and a relatively great mobility in relationship to
concrete social systems; in effect, “markets” allow owners routinely
to enter into or depart from specific social systems, insofar as
holdings in them may be bought and sold.

On the one hand, then, property gives its owner leverage on
social systems and, on the other, it allows him to elude the claims
normal to most social systems, extricating him from the usual
liabilities of membership. I have stressed that the latter potentially
generates a certain vulnerability, for it thereby also excludes him
from the protections that the mutual exchange of gratifications
usually establishes. Intrinsically, private ownership is a game that
one man plays against all others; in it, what one man owns another
may not own. It therefore does not enclose him in protective soli-
darities, except to the extent that he forgoes his right to exclude
others or he allows others easements on his property. But the
point, of course, is that private property does not obligate an owner
to do this, except for those in his family, and even this is not
necessarily a legally enforceable obligation. To hold property is to
hold it against all others and to be on guard against them.

The ultimate paradox is this: men seek property because they
do not want to (and, indeed, have found themselves unable to)
rely entirely on other men. To seek property is to seek security and
the enjoyment of advantage, despite the faithlessness, disloyalty,
envy, and turpitude of men, which are amply evidenced in all
social systems. Men seek property as a hedge against the deficien-
cies of social systems, most particularly because the disadvantaged
will not reliably protect the advantages of others, for not uncom-
monly they want them for themselves. Yet in seeking to protect
advantage by constituting it as property and establishing it apart
from social system involvements and obligations and apart from
the good will and trust of others, they create new 'vulnerabilities
for this very advantage. Property owners therefore have to look
elsewhere for the protection of their property than to ordinary
social systems composed of persons like themselves.

They look to the state. It is with the state that the owner’s rela-

Parsons on Power and Wealth 313

tionship is likely to be mutually reinforcing and relatively stable —
rather than with other private persons — and it is by the state that
his property rights will be most rigorously enforced. The state
provides ready and willing protection for property, and, in return,
owners protide the state with the resources and moral support
needed to maintain its activities on behalf of Taw and order. -
Although there is usually some disagreement over the price paid
for the state’s protective services — in short, taxes — the state and
property owners commonly develop mutual understanding and
appreciation. For in the end the greed of the state is less costly to
property owners than would be the need of the disadvantaged. Rela-
tively willing and able to support the state, and defined therefore as
responsible, loyal, and reliable, property owners can commonly
rely on the state’s reciprocal responsiveness to their interests.

This is by no means identical with the classical Marxian formula
characterizing the state as the "executive committee of the ruling
class,” for it premises an appreciable, if unspecified, degree of
autonomy of the state from the rich and property-owning, and a
corresponding degree of need and dependence by the latter in their
relation to the state. At the same time, however, neither is this
formulation identical with the traditional liberal conception of the
state as a nonpartisan force, independent and equally impartial to
the claims of all, for my formulation premises that commonly the
state will be particularly close and especially responsive to the
claims and interests of property owners.

TALCOTT PARSONS ON C. WRIGHT MILLS

In this connection it is worth noting some of Parsons’ criticisms of
C. Wright Mills’s The P ower Elite and, more generally, his views
on the role of the business class in the power system of American
society. Parsons acknowledged, in his critique of Mills, that, "given
the nature of an industrial society, a relatively well-defined elite or
leadership group should be expected to develop in the business
world .” 43 This, however, he holds is due not to the cumulative
advantages derived from property ownership, but largely to
certain unspecified functional imperatives of the social system.
It is Parsons’ tendency generally to deemphasize the importance
of property and wealth as a source of power in society and even
within the economy itself. (He thus maintains that the business

314 The World of Talcott Parsons

elite itself “is no longer an elite of property owners, but [of] pro-
fessional executives or managers .” 44

• Parsons adds, moreover, that the elite in the economy is not
identical with that in the society as a whole. One reason for this,
according to Parsons, is because eliteness is not exclusively mani-
fested in the power or influence of persons or groups. There are.
Parsons says, groups and persons that are functionally indispensa-
ble to modern society — his example: families and women — but
which are not powerful as such. Mills’s argument, however, in no
way premises that power derives from the functional importance
of persons or groups, but, if anything, stresses that powerholders
can control those who are functionally important. And while Mills
does not hold that only the rich have power, he does stress the
importance of the “corporate rich” in the total “power elite,” which
for him also includes the top military and top professional poli-
ticians. That the rich have more power than they can, or wish to,
manage personally, and therefore hire others to do so, simply
means that they do not exhaust the membership of the corporate
rich and not, as Parsons seems here to imply, that they have been
replaced by professionals. The fact remains, moreover, that profes-
sional managers own more corporate stock than any other occupa-
tional group, and they are very important property owners; they are
not only economically but also socially intermingled with the rich
in style of life, schooling, and organizational membership . 43

Mills had argued that governmental regulatory agencies did not
effectively control business. Parsons replied that this must be
wrong, because if “effective controls had not been imposed, I find
it impossible to understand the bitter and continuing opposition on
the part of business to the measures which have been taken .” 4 ' 1 He
concludes; therefore, that “there has been a genuine growth of
autonomous governmental power . . . and that one major aspect of
this has been the relatively effective control of the business sys-
tem .” 47 Actually, of course, two of the three main centers of Mills’s
“power elite” are the top military and the professional politicians,
which would imply that Mills acknowledged a substantial measure
of government autonomy.

One must also add here that, if business opposition to govern-
ment control is evidence of their effectiveness, as Parsons holds,
then the subsequent acceptance of government regulation suggests
that it did not prove to be very effective for very long or that
businessmen changed their minds concerning its implications.
Indeed, Parsons does make it quite clear that the Republican Party
— “the party of the bigger sector of business” 48 — now vies with the
Democratic Party “in promoting the extension of social security
benefits . . . [and] on the whole, business groups have accepted the

Parsons on Power and Wealth

315

new situation and cooperated to make it work.” 40 Yet, why should
businessmen now accept governmental influence, regulation, and
spending if they have not found it to their net advantage? And in
another part, it seems reasonable to view this initial resistance and
later acceptance as consistent with businessmen’s membership in
a larger elite, in which some sectors play a leadership role and, for
a while, act against the wishes and even the policies of others,
some of whom in time see they were mistaken in believing that
such leadership initiatives were against their interests. In point of
fact, businessmen have never been equally and universally opposed
to all controls over all business activity; they have often accepted
regulation of their own making, through cartels and price-fixing
arrangements, as well as many governmental forms of regulation.
Moreover, the resistance of some is not evidence of the resistance
of all sectors of business, for they do, indeed, have some important
interests at variance with one another. For example, there are
some business interests that are advantaged by military policy and
expenditure, while others lose if they result in a decline in welfare
expenditures.

It should also be noted, in this connection, that here Parsons
rather abruptly dismisses his own ordinary emphasis on the
systemic character and mutual interdependence of different sectors
of society. One would have thought that, rather than emphasizing
the autonomy of government in analyzing its relationship with
business, Parsons’ system model would have led him to stress their
mutual dependence. Parsons’ emphasis here on the autonomy of
government seems attributable not to his theoretical commitments
but to his overriding ideological predilections.

At one point he opts not only for the autonomy of government
but also for the societal dominance of politics: “In a complex
society the primary locus of power lies in the political system.” 110 At
the same time, however, Parsons also recognizes that business
leaders have traditionally been the leaders of the larger American
community, at least until quite recently. The key turning point,
he seems to suggest, was the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
(According to his line of reasoning, one must also conclude that
prior to the stock market crash the United States was not a “com-
plex” society.)

Parsons’ analysis of power in America is an unstable mixture:
of the realism of the conservative, who knows — from the inside,
as it were — the importance of business as the “natural” leader of
the community; combined with an ideological embarrassment at
the implications this has for traditional democratic ideology; and
spiced, as Parsons commonly prefers, with a dash of "up-to-date”
theoretical developments, which is, in this case, the pluralism of

316 The World of Talcott Parsons

some political scientists. Emphasis on government autonomy is
thus combined with a hard-headed realism about the importance of
business leadership. Parsons thus has no doubts that “a relatively
well-defined elite . . . should be expected to develop in the business
world,” nor any doubt that the hitherto conventional role of this
business elite was to lead the larger community. There has been,
he says, a “‘natural’ tendency for a relatively unique business
leadership of the larger community.”'’ 1 At the same time, however,
he sees this leadership as no longer unequivocal, and the question
arises as to how he views the present and forthcoming role of
business in the larger community.

One part of an answer is implied by Parsons’ observation that
there has been a growing autonomy of the government sector.
While part of this may result from an effort to cope with the effects
of increasing industrialization, another source, which Parsons is
at pains to emphasize, is “the enormous enhancement of American
responsibility in the world [which] has taken place in a relatively
short time.”'- 2 This, in large part, is seen as a response to the
revolutionary threat that the Soviet Union has posed for “our own
national values and interests . . . [and] only American action was
able to prevent Soviet domination of the whole continent of
Europe.”™

This rise of American “responsibility” in the world has, of neces-
sity, entailed a greater role for government and a corresponding
intrusion of new governmental elites on the traditional position of
leadership that business has held in the American community:
“the business group has had to give way at many points.”' 14 Parsons
also seems to attribute some special importance to the Depression
of the 1930s as a crucial factor in the undermining of the role of
business leadership in the larger community. He points out that
this major crisis was solved not by them but by government lead-
ers."’ 5 While Parsons does not expressly maintain that this began a
process which undermined the legitimacy of the business elite as
leaders of the community, for that would be a devastating critique
from Parsons’ standpoint, he does characterize the role of business
in the 1930’s as a “major failure.” 5 * 5

At any rate, there seems to be no question but that, in Parsons’
view, the business elite can no longer lead the American com-
munity in the future as they have in the past. At least, not in the
same manner or in the same degree. The national elite of American
society is thus, in his view, undergoing some still uncompleted
transition, involving a relative decline in the prominence of busi-
ness and a need for other, more political and governmental ele-
ments to assume increasing importance: “the tendency will be
toward a strengthening of the element of professional govern-

Parsons on Power and Wealth

317

mental officials who are essentially independent of short-run 'poli-
tics’ . , . the military officer is a special case of this type.” 57 But this
is still a new tendency, and, at present (1960), “a clearly defined
nonbusiness component of the elite has not yet crystallized . .
Thus, “the striking feature of the American elite [is] ... its fluid
and relatively unstructured character.” 58

This last statement, however, should at most be interpreted to
mean that the American national elite is not a closely knit, politi-
cally concerted, “capitalistically” dominated group, and, in par-
ticular, an hereditarily transmitted position. For Parsons, the
important consideration is the legitimacy of the elite, resting
particularly on its achievement; while he insists on this, he never
doubts for a moment that there is and must be an elite within
business and within the community at large. If anything, Parsons’
point — as we shall sec — is that there is a need for further develop-
ment of the elite, and, in particular, for a strengthening of its
nonbusiness elements: Parsons is an unembarrassed elitist.

Parsons’ analysis of power is essentially one that is compatible
with and reflects the development of the Welfare State: “it is
necessary for the older balance between a free economy and the
power of government to be considerably shifted in favor of the
latter. We must have a stronger government than we have tradi-
tionally been accustomed to, and we must come to trust it more
fully." 50 It is notable that Parsons does not say that, with this
increased power of the centralized government, there must also be
a corresponding strengthening of the power of the electorate and of
representative institutions, or even of the protection of popular
rights against infringement by this increasingly powerful govern-
ment. Parsons looks to a strengthening of the essentially “republi-
can" and elitist features of rulership in the United States, rather
than of the democratic. He calls for citizens to have a greater sense
of their duties rather than their rights. And he wants governors
who will have greater sense of moral responsibility, technical
competence, and public service, rather than responsiveness to their
constituencies. He wants a leavening of established business
leadership with professional, competent groups, all drawn from
social strata privileged enough to prepare them for devotion to and
development of a tradition of full-time “public service.” What the
country needs, in short, is increased governance by Harvard-type
men.

“The changed situation in which we are placed demands a far-
reaching change in the structure of our society,” says Parsons por-
tentously.' 1 ' 1 When his proposals are viewed in detail, however, it
becomes apparent that the change to which he refers is not at all
so "far-reaching”; indeed, it fundamentally entails acceptance of

318 The World of Talcott Parsons

and accommodation to the traditional power of business as well as
a movement in the direction of a more diversified power elite,
which in any event, has been occurring. The new situation, says
Parsons, demands, above all, three things:

The first is ... to encourage the ordinary man to accept greater
responsibility. The second is the development of the necessary imple-
menting machinery. Third is national political leadership, not only in
the sense of individual candidates for office or appointment, but in the
sense of a social strata where a traditional political responsibility is
ingrained . 01

The most important of these requirements, holds Parsons, is the
third, which seeks an elite stratum for which political responsibility
is traditional and which can provide a recruiting ground for those
who actually wield power. In my view, it is certain that such a
stratum must become hereditary.

What will be the role of the business elite in the enlarged
national political elite, as Parsons sees it? His answer is blunt and
clear :

Under American conditions, a politically leading stratum must be
made up of a combination of business and nonbusiness elements . . .
political leadership without prominent business participation is doomed
to ineffectiveness and to the perpetuation of dangerous internal con-
flict. It is not possible to lead the American people against the leaders
of the business world . . . yet the business world cannot monopolize or
dominate political leadership and responsibility . 62

In effect, Parsons conceives of the business elite as having a veto
power within American society. For, to say and emphasize that
American society cannot be led “against” the business leaders
clearly implies that, while no longer able to take initiatives as
formerly, they can still stop what they do not want. It is notable
that Parsons never makes any comparably flat statement about the
veto power of any other single segment of American society,
regardless of their functional importance. He never says that it is
impossible to lead American society against the wishes of the
purely political elite, the military, the civil service, the church, the
university, or even mothers. Surely this implies that business lead-
ers still are and must remain the single most important force in
the American political elite, despite the increased autonomy of
government and the primacy of the political center in complex
societies.

On a purely theoretical level, one cannot help but wonder how
such a conclusion derives from Parsons’ repeated insistence on the
plurality of the sources of social change and the mutual inter-

Parsons on Power and Wealth

3*9

dependence of various institutions, as stressed in his own system
model of society. For all of Parsons’ repeated insistence on the
manner in which his empirical conclusions axe guided and in-
formed by his theoretical position, here, and not for the first time,
the theory seems to imply one thing while the empirical conclusions
to which he comes are quite another. This is certainly not the first
time that such a disparity has occurred in the work of a systematic
theorist; and, in a way, it is to Parsons’ credit that he recognizes
that logical consistency- must be subordinated to empirical con-
siderations. Apparently there are some things one learns, by reason
of what one has seen and where one has been, that will not be
subordinated even to one's own theory.

Other substantive implications of the position Parsons takes here
are also worth noting. For one, if it is the case that American
political leadership is doomed to ineffectuality without the active
participation of business — and I would agree that, in our society,
this is “telling it as it is” — it is clear that the business group can
demand an extremely high price for its participation. A second
important implication warrants elaboration. While Parsons stresses
that the American community cannot be led without and cannot be
led against the business leadership, he also implies that it cannot be
led by them. Certainly it cannot now be led by them as once they
led it. This would seem to portend two other social trends. ( i ) If
there is a business elite with a continuing veto power in American
political life, as Parsons indicates, but which can no longer lead
the larger community as businessmen, then, certainly, it will seek
other roles and social arrangements in which it can express and
wield influence. And it continues to hold the power to win access to
these new positions. (2) If it is true that new, nonbusiness seg-
ments must play an increasing role in the national elite, it is
certain, given Parsons’ own assumptions concerning the continued
business veto power, that the former must accommodate them-
selves to the business leadership and, in effect, negotiate an alli-
ance with them.

From both sides, then, this implies a growing national “power
elite,” -with an interlocking membership and mutual understand-
ings, within whose broadened membership the business elite will
and does continue to play the single most important role. In effect.
Parsons comes surprisingly close to agreement with some of the
most fundamental conclusions which C. Wright Mills had ar-
rived at. The crucial difference between them on this involves
primarily not the empirical imputations about what Is happening to
the structure of power in the United States, but rather the
legitimacy of this development and of the new power elite itself.

320 The World of Talcott Parsons

In short, there seems to be much more agreement between Parsons
and Mills about the facts than their conflicting evaluations might
imply.

It is notable that there is, in all of Parsons’ discussion of power,
not a distinct word about the role of the propertied, middle class in
America. In a way, this may be another expression of Parsons'
realism, for this middle class seems increasingly to have lost its
will to power as well as its hold on power as it becomes the in-
creasingly suburbanized, deployable tool of corporate bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, the effective arena of political decision moves to the
higher, national levels.

In Par sons’ conception, the propertied sectors of the middle class
have disappeared in the new power elite. They have been ground
between the more traditional business elite with its abiding veto
power, and the newly emerging elites in the civil service, the
military, the professions more generally, and the universities which
are their training grounds. The fundamental Parsonsian map of the
new social elite sees it as composed of two parts, business and
“nonbusiness” (as Parsons sometimes calls it) or, in other words,
the professions. His fundamental map of society is bicameral,
divided between the temporal lords and the spiritual mandarins.
The words are the new words of Parsons; but the thought is the
abiding thought of Comte.

Clearly, there are deep and enduring structures in the develop-
ment of Academic Sociology that link nineteenth-century Positivism
to twentieth-century Functionalism. The academic sociologist still
speaks from the standpoint and represents the claims of the ed-
ucated nonpropertied sectors of the middle class, who now find the
Welfare State a uniquely suitable fulfillment of their vested profes-
sional interests, their elite ambitions, and their liberalism — which
is to say, their social utilitarianism.

ACHIEVEMENT, ASCRIPTION, AND THE FAMILY

Parsons, as we have seen earlier, argues that equality of oppor-
tunity is never fully possible, because differential advantages
accrue to children in different families and vary with the social
rank of the family. Leaving aside consideration of whether “com-
plete” equality of opportunity is ever attainable, Parsons is cer-
tainly correct in observing that children bom to different families

Parsons on Power and Wealth 3 21

have different advantages. What he systematically fails to see, how-
ever, is that “advantages” may be of fundamentally different sorts.
Some, like attitudes, motivations, social skills, cultural competen-
cies, and aspirations, are, while family-linked, basically different
from -property. The inheritance of property is the inheritance of
advantage of a special kind: it is the inheritance of rights — of
legally protected rights in valuable objects. Given the existence of
inheritable property, men are endowed at birth not with the same
but with very unequal positions.

The property endowments that children derive from their fam-
ilies reflect institutional commitments of the larger society that are
fundamentally at variance with the culture’s avowal to reward its
members on the basis of their demonstrated merit and their ca-
pacity to produce desired performances. Possessions, however, ad-
vantage the child for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do
with what he himself has accomplished or can do and, in that sense,
provide “unearned income.” Other family-transmitted endowments
may also advantage children, but they do so mainly with respect
to opportunities for “earned income.” It is differential access to
unearned income that is most at variance with the standards of
universalism and, especially, achievement.

While it is true that the elimination of private property and its
inheritance would by no means eliminate all inequalities — and,
indeed, was never expected to do so by any socialist thinker — it
would reduce differentials in opportunities for unearned income.
It seems clear that Parsons' ideal society is one in which rewards
are allocated universalistically on the basis of individual achieve-
ment. Parsons does recognize that his own ideal society is dis-
sonant with family-transmitted advantages, but he fails to see that
these are not all of one piece; the reduction of opportunities for
unearned income is by no means utopian or impossible, for the sys-
tem of inheritance and existent property institutions might be
changed without necessarily destroying the stability of the family.

One can assume that families wish to advantage their children
and will do so differentially under any inheritance and property
system, without assuming that they can do so only under existent
institutions of inheritance or property. Yet this is largely what
Parsons tends to believe. Moreover, even though such change would
by no means eliminate all opportunities for unearned incomes or
eliminate all power differentials, it would reduce them substan-
tially.

This would, in turn, have two consequences. First, it would
bring the actual societal allocation of rewards into greater con-
formity' with the universalistic and achievement, standards of the
society itself, and thus would reduce the disparity that exists be-

322 The World of Talcott Parsons

tween current practices and moral ideals; to that extent it would
contribute to the long-range stability of the society. Second, it
would reduce, though not eliminate, power differentials, with a
similar stabilizing consequence. Such a change would, therefore,
contribute to both the stability and the self-maintaining character
of the larger social system. Such change seems compatible with
views expressed by the early Parsons, to the effect that it is pos-
sible to build on the basis that we now have a more perfect society.
The question, of course, is what shall we regard as the unchangeable
basis: private property with inheritance, or universalistic and
achievement standards. (It is paradoxical that, although Parsons’
model of stable, self-maintaining social systems is a generalization
from certain characteristics of a capitalist, free-market economy, a
fuller realization of this self-maintaining, stable social system does
not seem possible in such a society. )

One basic way in which these implications are theoretically
obscured in Parsons’ own work is through his distinction between
“ascribed” and “achieved” status, or, as he later came to call it, the
“quality” versus “performance” pattern variable. By ascription or
quality standards, rewards are allocated to persons on the basis of
the culturally standardized identities assigned to them. That is, if
persons are defined as having, or being of, a certain sex or race,
they will, because of this assigned identity, have more or less op-
portunities and rewards. Where achievement or performance
standards are employed, however, persons will have varying oppor-
tunities and rewards allocated to them not on the basis of their
imputed cultural identities, but on the basis of the imputed degree
of correspondence between what they do and a certain norm or
standard.

The difficulty with using the achievement-ascription distinction
is that rewards that are allocated on the basis of achievement often
depend upon prior differential opportunities, which might not have
depended upon achievement. Achievement standards and rewards
based on them may conceal and legitimate an earlier allocation of
rewards and opportunities based upon ascription. This is the case
with differential family-transmitted advantages, and it is deeply
involved in ethnic discrimination, such as that to which Blacks in
the United States are subjected.

The whole achievement-ascription distinction obscures the ac-
tual mechanisms that make for differential rewards. The distinc-
tion makes it seem as if they are only of two kinds: ascriptive
mechanisms, which provide rewards based on cultural identities
and which largely use natural or biological attributes as their foci
(sex, age, race, ethnicity); or achievement mechanisms which
provide rewards on the basis of individual merit. What is glossed

Parsons on Power and Wealth

3 2 3

over is that achievement standards, in fact, often function to con-
ceal and to legitimate the prior operation of Tionachievement
standards. In short, what is presented as an honest competition
has actually been “fixed.” What is missed is the dynamic relation-
ship between the two sets of standards, which must be system-
atically seen as applying to different points in the life cycle.
Achievement standards thus become another manner in which an
advantaged elite can legitimate and perpetuate itself socictally,
without threatening those of its advantages that are not legitimate
by these same standards.

The achievement-ascription distinction also makes it seem that
rewards are allocated either in terms of how well the individual
does or else in terms of his imputed cultural identities, both of
which are culturally valued, attributes. What this distinction ignores
is that individuals may receive differential advantage simply be-
cause of what they have, their possessions, resources, facilities,
rather than because of their cultural identities of their individual
efforts. The child who inherits property is not advantaged either
because of what he has done or because of his imputed cultural
identity; his property advantages him simply because he can use it
to buy and control things that he desires. Moreover, he can also buy
further opportunities for unearned income, which, with modem
institutions of investment, may take little or no individual judg-
ment or merit. That he may sometimes lack individual judgment
and invest unwisely, ultimately losing his advantage and wasting a
social resource, is simply another expression of his differential
opportunity, signaling the inherent social dysfunctionality of un-
earned income.

ANOMIE AND PROPERTY INSTITUTIONS

Parsons’ achievement-ascription distinction comes down to saying
that, in the public sphere, we have a choice between rewarding men
on the basis of their merit or on the basis of some culturally valued
status or identity. As we have seen, this ignores the fact that their
merit often depends on and derives from their ascribed status.
Furthermore, it also ignores the fact that what men are given as
rewards in either way constitutes only a part of their access to life
chances, their access to “the good things of life.” Such access is
only partly a “reward” for the manifestation of valued qualities; it

324 The World of Talcott Parsons

derives also from the possession of scarce goods, however these
have come into their control. Access to life chances is, therefore,
structured by the institutions governing the accumulation, use, and
transmission of property. What men can do or can get depends not
only on what they are thought to do or be; it also depends upon
what they own. Access to life chances is thus systematically allo-
cated in ways that often have nothing to do with their recipient’s
culturally valued qualities, even if distributed in accordance with
institutionally sanctioned allocating systems.

The institutionalized allocating systems are, in this respect, not
integrated with the value system. He who has wealth and the
power it brings may enjoy more gratifications than those who mani-
fest or conform to the society’s values, even though he himself does
not. There are few pleasures that a man must forgo, and there
need be none denied his children, if only he is wealthy enough.
There are few powers and honors that are perpetually immune to
the blandishments of the wealthy. The tone-deaf may have the best
seats at the concert, the color-blind the best paintings, the undis-
criminating the best foods, the impotent the most exciting women,
the politically inept the highest offices. Given an institutional
system that endows men with great possessions quite apart from
their valued qualities or achievements, all this and more is possible.

Here, then, is a basic source of the failure of moral values that
Parsons ignores, despite his stress upon morality and his belief that
the stability of social systems rests upon it. For values will be
conformed with to the extent that men are given gratifications for
doing so. But under these conditions only a part of the gratifica-
tional resources of a society may be utilized to foster conformity
with its moral values. Institutions which transmit possessions and
wealth through the testamentary or hereditary succession of private
individuals thus demoralize men and conduce to anomie; because
of them a significant supply of the reinforcing gratifications is with-
drawn from support of the society’s value system, and it is thus
weakened. This is rather different from saying, as Robert Merton
does, that anomie results from the malintegration between means
and ends, or arises when individuals lack institutional means to
realize the cultural goals they have been taught to want. For here,
men who attempt to live by the value system are demoralized not
simply by their own lack of means and their own failures, but also
by witnessing that others may succeed even though they lack valued
qualities. Indeed, the demoralization is often similarly experienced
by those advantaged by these conditions, for they have seen from
birth that gratification is possible to them without conformity to the
society’s values.

Parsons on Power and Wealth

3-5

Robert Merton’s analysis of anomie starts with the assumption
that there is a malintegration between means and ends.'"' His struc-
tural analysis of the social conditions from which it derives in the
United States focuses on the nature of the class system, which he
characterizes as an “open class system.” By reason of its openness ,
presumably all are taught to seek the same cultural goals; by
reason of its being a class system, some have less means to realize
their aspirations, and thus anomie is said to arise for them. But
those at the top of the class system, because they inherit, do not
have to achieve their gratifications. Indeed, they can neither suc-
ceed nor fail, because they inherit. And there really is no evidence
that they are less anomic than those who fail; it is only that they
lend support to a status quo that provides them with their superior
life chances.

It is one thing to assume and quite another to account for the
generalized possibility of a malintegration between means and
ends. This potentiality derives, in large part, from the inherent
nature of certain of the “institutional means,” and specifically, from
the institutionalized transmission of private property. Given this
institution, there must be some malintegration between institu-
tionalized means and cultural goals. For, this institution guarantees
that some men will be more and others less gratified, even though
the former may manifest less and the latter more valued qualities.
It is crucial that we understand that it is this — property and in-
heritance — which explains how it happens that some have less
"means” while others have more.

The allocation of the means to succeed and, with this, of posi-
tion in the class system is, in appreciable part, a function of the
institution of private property and its hereditary or testamentary
transmission. Thus the distribution of anomic responses is a func-
tion of this institution. But, to repeat, it does not follow that those
on the top of the class system are less anomic, if by this is meant
that they have more of a genuine belief in and devotion to the
culture’s moral values. Indeed, there is reason to predict that their
genuine commitment to these moral values is undermined by the
very institution from which they derive their advantages. For this
institution makes it possible to sever the connection between
gratifications and conformity with cultural values. From this
standpoint, then, any institution — whether private property or an-
other — that allocates life chances in a manner that does not depend
upon the recipient’s manifestation of valued qualities thereby
undermines the value system of its society and spreads anomie. In
short, the spoiler of the society’s morality is, in the Veblenian sense,
“vested interest,” the right to something for nothing. And this is

326 The World of Talcott Parsons

precisely the nature of the hereditary transmission of property: it
is the right to give valuables to someone who has not earned them,
and the corresponding right to receive them and use them as if they
were earned.

DIFFERENTIATION OF THE PRESTIGE
HIERARCHY AND MORAL CODE

The relationship between property and the moral code is a particu-
larly important aspect of the relationship between the larger system
of stratification and the society’s value system. My previous point
has been largely to stress that the existence of individual property
constitutes a preemption of certain advantages or gratifications. It
is consequential for conformity to the moral code, first, because it
involves an entailment upon and hence a net reduction of the sup-
ply of gratifications that might be mobilized in support of moral
conformity and, second, because it attenuates the relationship ex-
perienced between moral conformity and gratification.

It is of fundamental importance to know why it is that men
conform with any moral code and under what conditions they will
continue or cease to do so. It is not enough simply to assert that
they do, and that courses of action differ as a result. This is merely
to assert that values make some difference in social outcomes and
that they are autonomous factors in producing social change or
social stability. This, we might say, is simply a form of Vidgar
Idealism. The Vulgar Idealist is, however, sometimes a good ob-
server, for he correctly notes that men often experience themselves
as conforming with certain values without regard to the conse-
quences. the rewards or costs, because of the intrinsic worth im-
puted to them. Where the Vulgar Idealist goes wrong is in his
failure to see that this in itself is something that requires ex-
planation and that varies with certain conditions. If, in effect, the
Vulgar Idealist is one who imputes importance to values but fails
to explain why, the Vulgar Marxist, we might say, generally
depreciates the importance and autonomy of values. The Vulgar
Marxist tends to stress the correspondence between values and
interests, and hence assumes there is no value autonomy that needs
to be explained. \

My own position is that there is ample evidence for a measure
of autonomy in moral codes and in morally oriented behavior, in

Parsons on Power and Wealth o 2 -

the sense that men can and do act at variance with certain of their
“material,” or economic and class, interests. At the same time,
however, it does not at all follow from this that these are the only
interests that may bind men to moral courses; that moral behavior
is absolutely autonomous; that it is an unmoved mover; that once
committed to a moral course of action men never swerve, but
continue to pursue it indefinitely; and that we should not seek to
account for the conditions under which men continue to pursue
a set of values or withdraw from such efforts in order to seek or
pursue different values. In short, neither Vulgar Marxism nor
Vulgar Idealism suffices.

My most basic assumption is that the extent to which men
conform with a given value or set of values is a function of the
rewards or gratifications associated with such conformity. (In other
words, I do not assume that morally conforming action must
always yield gratification, or that it is always intrinsically satisfy-
ing.) Thus I generally assume that men’s commitment to a moral
code will tend to continue as long as the gratifications associated
with it continue, though, as indicated earlier in my discussion of
declining marginal utility, I do not expect that there will be a one-
to-one correspondence between increments of conformity and in-
crements of gratification. Moreover, and as another basic assump-
tion, I assume that the gratifications experienced in pursuing a
given moral norm or code bind the actor to it to a degree which is
also affected (in general, diminished) by the costs, the difficulties,
the exertions he must put forth in pursuing it, as well as by the
gratifying alternatives that the exertions of the pursuit necessitate
he forego. In short, I assume that men will drift (not leap) to
where the gratification is.

To some extent, however, what they experience as gratifying is a
function of what they believe to be desirable or moral; in turn,
what they believe to be desirable or moral is a function of the
gratifications produced in pursuing this. There is thus, to some
degree, a benign, mutually supportive interaction between gratifica-
tion and moral conformity. It is, in part, this that gives moral
norms the deceptive appearance of autonomy. But there would
never be any nonmoral behavior or any changes in a moral code, if
the only gratifications men could experience were from conformity
with it, if the amount of gratification men received from conformity
with a moral norm never changed, if the costs of conformity
never changed, and if new possibilities of gratification alternative
to established morality were never made possible. In actuality,
however, none of these conditions obtain. Most crucially, men can
and commonly do experience gratifications from immoral and non-
moral behavior, the costs of moral conformity to a particular moral

328 The World of T akott Parsons

norm are continually changing, and the alternatives men have vary
in their attractiveness, partly as a function of the other changes;
this last, in turn, causes changes in the costs and gratifications
of continued conformity to established moral norms.

I have said that the extent to which men will conform with a set
of values is a function of the gratifications that are associated with
such conformity. There are four main types of rewards that can
yield gratifications. Two of these, power and wealth, are “extrinsic”
to moral conformity as such; that is, they may be attained quite
apart from moral conformity, either as a result of chance oppor-
tunities to acquire them or as a result of institutionalized arrange-
ments such as allocations made through inheritance. Moreover,
power itself is inherently the opportunity to achieve one’s aims
despite the resistance, which may be expressed as moral disap-
proval, of others. In short, power enables men to get what they
want even when what they want and the way they seek to get it is
at variance with conventional morality. This is not to say, however,
that power and wealth are not more securely held to the extent
that others believe their possessors to have come by them and to
exercise them in conformity with moral norms,- it is to say that
power and wealth are and may secure gratifications not neces-
sarily contingent on the moral approval of others.

At the opposite end of the continuum are the “intrinsic” gratifica-
tion-yielding rewards; these are essentially a form of self-approval,
a feeling of rectitude or of good conscience that one experiences
simply by reason of conformity with the moral code. This is an as-
pect of the seeming autonomy of morality. But since, as mentioned
previously, moral conformity always entails the cost of overcoming
one’s internal ambivalences, it cannot be expected to continue in-
definitely (even if it does continue for an appreciable period) by
reason of self-approval alone and without other auxiliary gratifica-
tions. Somewhere between the “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” gratifica-
tions, with which moral conformity may be rewarded, is the
approval — the prestige, respect, or affection — given by others to
those who conform with a moral code.

There are inherent difficulties in using wealth and power as
rewards for conformity to a moral code-, first, because, while not
fixecLand ^nfi&stic in quantity, they are nonetheless scarce, so that
..people who have&hem are loath to part with them; and, second,
because those wMP ossess ^ em can, in the nature of the case,
effectively resist thel redistribution to others. In contrast, however,
both self-approval an? a PP rova l by others for moral behavior can
be awarded without al ec ^ threatening existent distributions of
power or wealth. The iA e a PP rova ! or prestige as a reward for
271 oral conformity does \ ot re P uire that property institutions be

Parsons on Power and Wealth gag

changed or that existent allocations of power and wealth be re-
formed in a manner costly to those already advantaged by it.

The line of “least resistance,” then, is to promote moral con-
formity by mobilizing gratifications that derive from the approval
of others or from self -approval. This means that men must be
taught to express or give approval to those conforming with a
moral code and that they must be taught to place value upon the
sheer approval of others, thus enabling, them to derive gratifica-
tions from it; and/or that they must be trained (“socialized”) to
have a “good conscience” when they do conform to a moral code,
or a bad one when they do not; and, finally, that such approval,
from self or other, be given in some positive relationship to the
moral conformity shown.

Essentially, then, the stability of a moral code within a society
having a significant measure of class stratification will depend on
the society’s ability to mobilize approval or prestige for conformity
with its prescriptions. This means that approval must be given for
things other than wealth or power themselves, and yet things de-
fined as being of great importance. Without this, the poor and the
powerless would have only the slimmest chance to achieve the
gratifications necessary to sustain their conformity with the moral
code, for there would be few important values that they might
share with the advantaged. It is thus essential to the requirements
for both a stable class and power system and for a stable moral
code, that the prestige hierarchy achieve a measure of differentia-
tion from the wealth and power hierarchies, so that a man be
capable of achieving high prestige even though poor or powerless.

It is in this context that we can perhaps better understand why
the moral codes of Europe have traditionally, insistently, and, in-
deed, polemically differentiated “spiritual” from “materialistic”
values: the latter are associated with power and wealth and the
worldly comforts, while spiritual values are not only set apart from
but above these, and held to be achievable by all, and sometimes
even more readily when the worldly comforts are lacking. In such
a value system, with its basic distinction between material and
spiritual values, there is a built-in disposition to “give unto Caesar,”
which produces a readiness to accept the given distributions of
power and wealth. The really important values, it is implied, are
not these, but rather the “goods of the soul,” which are not scarce
and may be achieved without requiring others to have less of them.

To the extent that a moral code stresses spiritual values and
defines them as superior to materialistic values, it therefore reduces
the pressure on established wealth and power hierarchies. It dimin-
ishes motivation to reform or change by enabling the poor and
powerless to achieve gratifications through approval or a sense of

33° The: World of Talcott Parsons

rectitude. It thus commits them to value elements they may share
with the more fortunate, and thereby contributes to the mainte-
nance of the given social system. With the development of a moral
code stressing spiritual values rewarded by approval of self or
others, the “moral identities” that men have — that is, whether they
are “good,” “bad,” respectable, honest, etcetera — become both cul-
turally salient and distinct from class identities. Such a moral code
can create distinctions that obscure and compensate for those
worldly distinctions established by the wealth and power systems.
With such a moral code, it is no longer only men’s “worldly” con-
ditions that count, but their moral status as well. A man may be
satisfied by feeling he is “poor but respectable.”

I have suggested, then, that the “goods of the soul” can be ob-
tained without impairing vested interests or shaking the class
system and thus, in effect, provide a spiritual reform that serves as
an alternative to earthly revolution. Yet this is not altogether suc-
cessful as a protection to the class and power system, for, to the
extent that the moral code and the prestige hierarchy become dif-
ferentiated from it, they inevitably generate certain strains upon
the class and power system. The dilemma is this: the class and
power system require, for their stability, a differentiated moral
system and a rewarding prestige hierarchy; but the more “autono-
mous” they become, the greater becomes the likelihood of strain
between the two systems. In other words, one major source of the
endemic tension between the “ideal” and the “actual” in social sys-
tems is that a distinct class and power system must create a moral
system whose values oppose it. 64

Insofar as men may acquire prestige in a community apart from
their possession of either wealth or power, and, in particular, to
the extent that prestige is scrupulously allocated in universalistic
ways — that is, in proportion to conformity with the group’s values
— those who are high and mighty within the power and class sys-
tem may come to have less prestige than those lower in it. The high
and mighty may, indeed, be judged to be neither the best nor the
most competent men, and thus is set in motion an endemic drain
on their legitimacy. This is all the more likely to happen to the ex-
tent that wealth and power are transmitted by hereditary succession.
Moreover, to the extent that there develop groups with relatively
high prestige but of no particular advantage in the society’s power
and wealth hierarchies, these groups may use their prestige to
mobilize support for modifications in the wealth-power hierarchies,
either on their own behalf or on that of the collectivity, as they
view it.

One of the most fundamental and abiding problems of such
societies is to develop a variety of accommodations to control,

Parsons on Power and Wealth

mitigate, or conceal this tension between the differentiated moral
code and prestige hierarchy, on the one hand, and the power and
wealth hierarchies, on the other. For one, the culture may empha-
size that the rewards of the conforming moral individual will be
secured in an afterlife. Again, there may be a development of
secondary adjustments that provide opportunities for upward social
mobility in the wealth and power hierarchies for those judged to
manifest appropriate virtues or competencies. A different, but most
pervasive accommodation is “normalized repression,” which, in
effect, simply makes it traditional or customary for men to be given
less than they might claim under the moral code, and justifies it
simply in terms of “realism” or “practicality.”

THE NATURE OF FUNCTIONALIST CONSERVATISM:
A SUMMARY AND OVERVIEW

That the ideological character of Functionalism is conservative in
nature, should, by this point, be perfectly clear; yet what this
“conservatism” means still requires some overall, summary clarifi-
cation. I might begin by suggesting that Functionalism’s conserva-
tism is more a quiet than a militant one, whose character has had
to accommodate to Functionalism’s self-image as an objective,
politically neutral discipline. Ever since Durkheim, Functional-
ism’s concern with social “order” has served to project an image of
itself as being committed only to the common needs of all elements
of modem society, and as, presumably, nonpartisan. At the same
time, however, this same concern with order has commonly made
Functionalism uneasy about demands for a basic reallocation of
social advantages, thus allowing it to work within and for the par-
ticular form of industrialism under which it first came into exist-
ence: until recently this has been essentially capitalist in character.

Yet this is not equivalent to saying that Functionalism is inher-
ently and necessarily capitalistic in its ideological commitments,
for, as I shall more elaborately maintain later, I also believe Func-
tionalism to be congenial to socialist forms of industralization, at
a certain level in their development. In holding that Functionalism
is not inherently procapitalist or prosocialist, however, I am not
saying that it is neither conservative nor radical. I am, in fact,
maintaining that its very adaptability to both capitalism and social-
ism (at certain levels in their development) is precisely what

332 The World of Talcott Parsons

makes it essentially conservative in character. In this regard Func-
tionalism is at one with the Positivism that Comte earnestly prom-
ised would “consolidate all power in the hands of those who possess
this power — whoever they may be.” The conservatism of Function-
alism is akin to that of the Catholic Church, which is by no means
linked to capitalism any more than it was to feudalism and which
has, indeed, found ways of adapting to socialist societies.

Although Functionalism is adaptable to all established industrial
systems, it is not equally responsive to new orders that are only
coming into being, for these may be the foes of those already
established. What makes a theory conservative (or radical) is its
posture toward the institutions of its own surrounding society. A
theory is conservative to the extent that it: treats these institutions
as given and unchangeable in essentials; proposes remedies for
them so that they may work better, rather than devising alterna-
tives to them; foresees no future that can be essentially better than
the present, the conditions that already exist; and, explicitly or
implicitly, counsels acceptance of or resignation to what exists,
rather than struggling against it.

Functionalists, then, constitute the sociological conservation
corps of industrial society. They are conscientious “guardians”
devoted to the maintenance of the social machinery of whatever
industrial society they are called upon to service. They pray to the
gods of the city — whoever they may be, and wherever they may
be. When Functionalists are, at length, unavoidably drawn into the
problems of developing industrial societies in “underdeveloped
areas,” they characteristically tend to conceive of the task as a
problem in “modernization” or “industrialization.” They focus on
those elements that any and all forms of industrial society share,
thus once again backing away from the hard question of choosing
among sharply divergent forms and, in effect, accepting the
property and class system in existence.

The historical mission of Functionalism is not to help bring
industrialization about; it is to bulwark it, once it has come, it is
to provide aid to industrial society, after it has been established
and calls for help. One is reminded of the legend about Comte,
sitting in his office, every day, patiently, waiting for the sympathetic
man of business who never came to call. He was, as Marx said of
Saint-Simon, ahead of his time. For Comte’s heirs, however, the
waiting is now at an end. Established industrial societies have a
need for social scientists, who can help maintain and operate them
smoothly; who can be trusted conscientiously to conserve the
established machinery and keep it running; who may be called
upon to speed up or slow down the motor, “customize” a body job,
and even, occasionally, to recommend nonstandard replacements

Parsons on Power and Wealth 333

for a part; but who, nonetheless, are restricted to maintenance and
operation activities, and are not expected to design new machinery
or the totally new plants that could produce them.

Functionalism’s essential posture, it is apparent, is not neces-
sarily anti-socialist or even procapitalist. But it is nonetheless
conservative. It can and it will work to conserve either form of
industrialism, once it is established. Although it does not quite see
how to go fonvard, or toward what, Functionalism is not “reac-
tionary" in its intent: it does not believe in going back. Func-
tionalists are not Pollyannas who see no fault in the status quo.
But neither do they see possibilities of a future significantly
different from the present.

It is this conservative character, this disposition to support
whatever powers are established, that makes it understandable
that Functionalism could depart from its traditional neglect
of the state, and even move toward an alliance with the Welfare
State, at least after it had been developed in society and widely
accepted even by elements that were politically conservative. At
that point the social utilitarianism long embedded in Functionalism
and Academic Sociolog}’ more generally, w’as freed to be mobilized
in support of state initiatives and controls. At that point Func-
tionalists were able to define themselves as moderate “liberals"
and align themselves with others of that political persuasion.

FUNCTIONALISM AS VALUE UNFREE

The ideological resonance of Functionalism is most visible when
cast in the form of large-scale, grand theorizing, such as Talcott
Parsons'. It should not be assumed, however, that “middle range"
theories are devoid of such ideological implications. Indeed, it is
a latent function of the middle range style of theorizing — in which
each small intellectual garment is peeled off one at a time, in a
kind of ideological strip tease — to conceal the nature and, indeed,
the very existence of its underlying, larger view of the good society
and the good man; thus the theorist reinforces his image of him-
self as a “value-free” scientist.

Modem Functionalism often projects an image of itself as
politically and ideologically neutral. It sees itself as above politics
and partisanship and, to that extent, as “value-free.” While ac-
knowledging that ideological commitments may be found in the

334 The World of Talcott Parsons

work of some individual Functionalists, it avers that these are
idiosyncratic expressions, random individual biases that are not
intrinsic to Functional theory “as such.” Though this concedes that
some individual Functionalists do manifest ideological biases, this
defense of Functionalism avoids examining their source, and thus
it can provide no basis for understanding how other Functionalists
can or do avoid them. It simply implies that, in some unexplained
manner, some Functionalists may overcome the bias-inducing
forces to which others capitulate. Containing neither an argument
nor a proof of its contentions, it is simply an affirmation of its
own position and a denial of the other.

Robert Merton’s essay on manifest and latent functions argues
that Functionalism is neither intrinsically conservative nor in-
trinsically radical. 6 " The structure of his argument is worth atten-
tion. First, he attempts to defend this assertion by showing that
Functionalism has been attacked as being both conservative and
radical. Then he is at pains to show that there are certain conver-
gences between Marxism and Functionalism, for he is taking special
care to defend Functionalism against the accusation of conserva-
tism. This would seem to suggest that he is less perturbed by the
accusation of “radicalism.” One of Merton’s central premises is
that, if Functionalism can be shown to converge with Marxism,
then a prima facie case has been made that Functionalism must
be free of a conservative bias. But this, of course, assumes that
Marxism is, in all respects, a radical ideology. His entire approach
requires that the focus be turned on the ways in which conserva-
tive and radical ideologies differ, and, in consequence, it neglects
the manner in which both are, in some ways and at some times,
alike. Insofar as Functionalism embodies ideological components
that conservatism and radicalism share, then to say that Func-
tionalism has been accused of having both ideological tendencies
is not, of course, the same as saying that Functionalism is value-
free. Indeed, it was Merton’s central concern not to do this but
to show that the values with which Functionalism is imbued are
not necessarily conservative. However, merely to show that Func-
tionalism has been accused of both ideological tendencies is not
to show that both accusations are equally well-founded; nor should
the sheer existence of each accusation be deemed sufficient to
discredit the other.

It seems clear that both Western capitalism and socialism do, at
least, converge on certain industrial values; they also converge in
other ways. During certain periods of their development, both alike
have extolled a value system based on self-sacrifice and self-
control. Both have invoked a gratification-deferring and self-deny-
ing ethic of restraint. It is, therefore, not only in their industrialism

Parsons on Power and Wealth 335

that they have sometimes been alike, and not only, as Emile Durk-
heim said, in their commitment to economic or “material” values.
And, although it does so with considerable ambivalence, Marxism
shares a measure of social utilitarianism with Functionalism : both
agree that men must be useful for the larger collectivity. Both also
share certain “spiritual” or ascetically tinged values and commonly
call for the postponement of individual gratifications, at least
during certain periods of their development, in the name of some-
thing higher and better.

Simply because certain brands of conservatism and radicalism
are profoundly different in some respects does not mean that
there are no other values which they share. Mr. Merton was led
down this path, I suspect, not primarily because he wanted to
demonstrate that Functionalism was ideologically neutral. He did
so, I would conjecture, because he sought to make peace between
Marxism and Functionalism precisely by emphasizing their affini-
ties, and thus make it easier for Marxist students to become
Functionalist professors.

The ideological dimension in Functionalism — its value-unfree
element — becomes most evident when its affinities with certain
elements common to both Marxism and conservatism are seen.
That these convergences may, today, be seen more readily is at-
tributable to a number of social processes that have advanced
markedly since 1949 when Mr. Merton first wrote his defense of
the ideological character of Functionalism. For one, the crisis of
Marxism has grown continuously since then; in particular, it has
involved the mounting sense, even among Marxists, that the
Marxism they knew was often lacking in radicalism. In large
measure, the turning back to the "young” Marx of “alienation” is
an effort to rescue a viable radical element in Marxism. The search
for the young Marx suggests that Marxism, in some of its dominant
historical embodiments, is no longer felt to be radical, and thus
no longer sufficiently different from forms of contemporary con-
servatism.

In saving that Functionalism’s ideology is conservative. I mean
to suggest, primarily, that its fundamental posture toward its
surrounding society entails an acceptance of its master institutions,
but not that it is necessarily procapitalist and antisccialist. Com-
mitted as it is to the value of order, it can do no other than accept
the kind of order in which it finds itself. This commitment to
order has two sides, which, taken together, spell out what I believe
to be the core of Functionalism’s conservatism. On the one side,
it is disposed to place itself and its technical skills at the sendee of
the status quo, and to help maintain it in all the practical ways
that a sociology can. It is ready and willing, even if not able to do

336 The World of Talcott Parsons

so. On the other side, it is not disposed to a public criticism of the
master institutions of the larger society. Functionalism’s conserva-
tism is expressed, then, in both its reluctance to engage in social
dissent or criticism and its simultaneous willingness to help solve
social problems within the context of the status quo.

Functionalism’s attitude toward social criticism is very much at
the heart of its conservatism. It cannot be supposed, however, that
its conservatism implies that it is devoid of all critical impulse;
for it no more feels that all is right with its world than does the
ordinary, sociologically unsophisticated conservative. Functionalists
have their own reasons for feeling a genuine ambivalence toward
their society, however little the critical side of this ambivalence
may be given overt expression. These have several sources. Func-
tionalism’s vested interests, its practical interests as an academic
discipline, require that there be work for it to do, in order to win its
mandate and sponsorship from some sector of the society. This cer-
tainly would not be forthcoming if sociology were to respond to
societal needs with bland reassurances that things as they are, are
really for the best. It thus has to be able to acknowledge and share
the self-criticisms of society’s managers. But there is much more to
it than that. Still another source of Functionalism’s ambivalence
derives from its central concern with the problem of societal order.
To men who respect order, the status quo, indeed any status quo, is
surely not the best that can be imagined. Moreover, their concep-
tion of themselves as “value-free” scientists, while not accurate,
does reflect an underlying structure of sentiment that entails a
certain remoteness from the rhythms of contemporary society,
a feeling that they are marching to a somewhat different music.
To some degree, it expresses a remoteness common to all with-
drawn scholars. In addition, it also derives from the feeling of
some Functionalists that they are the guardians of certain pre-
carious values (and particularly, order), toward which they have
a special duty.

Although Functionalists have added a concept of the “dysfunc-
tional” to their inventory of concepts, it is difficult to avoid the
impression that this was done in part for the sake of formal
completeness. It was a belated finger in the dike, rather than part
of the dike itself. It was not, in short, an expression of the infra-
structure of sentiments animating Functional theory. Nor do I
consider it amiss to take note of the fact — a social fact that means
something and has, somehow, to be explained — that Functionalists
do call their theory “Functionalism; they do not call it “Dysfunc-
tionalism.” Can it be assumed that this is a mere happenstance, and
that they might just as easily call it “Dysfunctionalism”?

Some years ago Marion Levy maintained that American Func-

Parsons on Power and Wealth 337

tionalists had mistakenly defined the concept of “Function.” What
they usually call “Function,” Lev7 said, referring as it does only
to successful adaptation, should properly have been called Eufunc-
tion, which would be a logical counterpart to the notion of unsuc-
cessful adaptation entailed by the concept Dysfunction.” The
term “Function,” said Levy, was mistakenly equated with the term
“Eufunction.” But, how did this “mistake” happen, and what does
it mean? Typical of the manner in which sociologists exempt their
own behavior from serious analysis, Levy’ approached this question
as he would never approach a similar problem in studying the
language behavior of ordinary’ laymen. He simply treated it as an
error in logic. I, however, regard this as a revealing symptom of
the underlying metaphysics or background assumptions of Func-
tionalism, and one which accurately expresses the conservative
commitments it embodies.

NOTES

x. Parsons seems to assume that fraud is, by definition, the pursuit of
"selfish" goals. This is an unfortunate exercise of conceptual license, which
limits observations of the empirically various ways by which social systems
may be integrated. The “noble lie" is a fraud presumably perpetuated on
behalf of the collective welfare; and “tact” may be thought of as an altruistic
form of fraud on a "small group” level.

2. T. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied (Glencoe,
III.: The Free Press, 1949), pp. 166-184.

3. Ibid., pp. 166-167.

4. Class, Status and Power, R. Bendix and S. M. Lipset, eds. (Glencoe,
III.: The Free Press, 1953), pp. 92-128.

5. Ibid., p. 93.

6 . Ibid., p. 93.

7. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied, pp. 178—179.

8. Bendix and Lipset, Class, Status and Power, p. 112.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., p. 113.

xi. Ibid., p. 114.

12. Ibid., p. 1 16.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 120.

15. I bid., p. 122.

16. Ibid., p. 125.

17. Ibid., p. 126.

iS. Ibid., p. 127.

19. T. Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modem Society (New York: Free
Press, 1967), p. 297.

20. Ibid., p. 308.

21. Ibid.

22. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied, p. 172.
(Italics mine.)

23. Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modem Society, p. 316.

24. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied, p. 50.

33 s T h e World of Talcott Parsons

25. Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modern Society, p. 331.

26. Ibid., p. 288.

27. Ibid., p. 324.

28. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied, p. 179,

29. Ibid.

30. Bendix and Lipset, Class, Status and Power, p. 104.

31. Ibid.

32. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied, p. 105.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., p. 109.

35. An honorable exception is Wilbert E. Moore, Industrial Relations and
the Social Order, revised edition (New York: Macmillan, 1931). See
especially pp. 51-58, 598-604.

36. Neil Smelser, The Sociology of Economic Life (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ. : Prentice-Hall, 1963).

37. Neil Smelser and Talcott Parsons, Economy and Society (Glencoe,

111 .: The Free Press, 1957). "

38. Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modem Society, pp. 319-320.
(Author’s italics.)

39. Parsons and Smelser, Economy and Society, p. 123.

40. Ibid., p. 113.

41. Ibid., p. 113.

42. T. Parsons, Structure and Process in Modem Societies (Glencoe, 111 .:
The Free Press, i960), p. 220.

43. Ibid., p. 211.

44. Ibid., p. 212.

45. See, for example, The Business Establishment, E. F. Cheit, ed. (New
York: Wiley and Sons, 1964); and G. W. Domhoff and H. B. Ballard,- C. W.
Mills and the Power Elite (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), especially p. 270.

46. Parsons, Structure and Process in Modem Societies, p. 213-214.

47. Ibid., p. 214.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., p. 231.

50. Ibid., p. 212.

51. Ibid., p. 232.

52. Ibid., p. 206.

53. Ibid., pp. 209, 227.

54. Ibid., p. 232.

55. Ibid., p. 234.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., p. 217.

58. Ibid., p. 233.

59. Ibid., p. 241.

60. Ibid., p. 246.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., pp. 246-247.

63. See, R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, 111 .:
The Free Press, 1957), pp. 131-194.

64. Cf. Wilbert Moore’s emphasis on the “lack of close correspondence
between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘actual,’ ” as a “universal feature of human
societies,” and which simply takes it as a given, a kind of tragic universal,
that “ideal values are not generally achieved.” Wilbert E. Moore, Social
Change (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 18-19.

65. See R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, pp. 37 ff-

66. See M. J. Levy, Jr., The Structure of Society (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1952), pp. 76 ff.

PART III

The Coming Crisis of
W estern Sociology

CHAPTER

The Coming Crisis of
W e stern Sociology > I:

The Shift toward the
Welfare State

Functional theory, and Academic Sociology more generally, are
now in the early stages of a continuing crisis. What follows in this
volume is an effort to clarify the symptoms and sources of this
crisis and to elucidate some of its possible outcomes. I shall also
maintain, although I can develop this only in a cursory manner
here, that much the same thing seems to be imminent for Marxism.
It, too, is in or approaching crisis. Since I regard Academic
Sociology and Marxism as the two major, structurally different
aspects of Western Sociology, I therefore regard Western Sociology
as a whole as facing a “coming crisis.” It is with this problem that
I reach the summit of my concerns in the present volume.

The central implication of a crisis is not, of course, that the
“patient will die.” Rather, the implication is that a system in crisis
may, relatively soon, become something quite different than it
has been. A system undergoing crisis will change in significant
ways from its present condition. While some of these changes may
be only temporary and may soon restore the system to its previous
condition, this is not the distinctive implication of a systeni crisis. A
crisis, rather, points to the possibility of change that may be more
permanent, producing a basic metamorphosis in the total character.
When a system undergoes crisis, it is possible that it will soon no
longer be the thing it was; it may change radically or may even
fail to survive, in some sense.

Systems, of course, are always and continually changing, but
this does not necessarily mean that they are in crisis. A crisis
implies that taxing changes are proceeding at a relatively rapid

3 41

34 2 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

rate; that they entail relatively sharp conflict, great tensions, and
heightened costs for the system undergoing them; and, finally, it also
implies the possibility that the system may soon find itself in a
significantly different state than it had recently been. Essentially,
this is my contention about Functional theory, Academic Sociology,
and Western Sociology most broadly.

THE WELFARE STATE AND FUNCTIONALISM

We may start with the observation (discussed in the last chapter)
that, in his later writings, Parsons has become increasingly out-
spoken in his support of governmental regulation of the economy
and of some version of the Welfare State in general. This is a key
transition in his standpoint. It is a key transition, however, not
only in Parsons’ own standpoint but also in the larger tradition of
theory from which it derives.

Throughout its development, from its heritage in Positivism, its
development in English anthropology, and its formulation by Durk-
heim during the Classical period, Functional theory, much as it
was sometimes concerned about the state, attributed relatively little
importance to it or to its initiative and responsibility for the man-
agement of the social problems produced by a market economy.
The focus of early Positivistic Sociology was largely on “spon-
taneous” social arrangements that grew “naturally.” It polemically
counterposed such spontaneous patterns to those that were planned
and deliberately instituted, as, for example, the constitution-making
drive of the classical, continental bourgeoisie. Positivism, then, did
not greatly concern itself with the contribution that “politics” or
the state might make to social stability. It saw stability as deriving
largely from the new technology, science, the division of labor, or
the development of a new morality appropriate to the emerging
industrial society. The Positivists, in short, tended to minimize, if
not deprecate, the role of the state, even when (as did Saint-Simon)
they stressed the importance of remedying the conditions of the
emerging working class.

Functional Anthropologists, for their part, found themselves
studying native societies dominated by foreign states, and their
usual neglect of the specifically imperialist relation between the
native society and the colonial power necessarily meant a neglect
of the state apparatus that was in effective control of native socie-

The Shift toward the Welfare State 343

ties. Moreover, these societies commonly did not have a native
state apparatus or a native politics in anything like the sense that
European societies possessed them. Again, Durkheim, in his time,
regarded modem industrial societies as needing not a stronger
state apparatus but a new social structure to mediate between
individuals and the state. There is no doubt that Durkheim believed
the state incompetent to manage what he regarded as the decisive
problem of modem Europe, its “poverty of morality/’ aiiomie . The
syndicalist-type “corporations,” with which Durkheim proposed to
revitalize morality, were carefully to maintain their independence
of the state. He also conceived of them as the new basis of political
organization and as the fundamental political entity, minimizing
the importance of the territorial bases of social organization and
thus of the state. 1 In a similar vein, early Parsonsian theory, warn-
ing of the unpredictabilities of "purposive social action,” expressed
suspicion of the Welfare State then crystallizing in New Deal
reforms. Early Functionalism and the tradition from which it
emerged, then, did little to focus attention upon the role of the
state; the Parsonsian accommodation to the Welfare State after
World War II was, indeed, a significant shift.

Functional Sociology corresponds to the standpoint of a society,
or of those groups within it, that does not conceive of its social
problems as rooted in its basic property institutions, but which
must regulate the disruptive impact of its market institutions and
adjust its allocative arrangements, lest these result in threats to
the property institutions. Insofar as Functional Sociology conceives
itself as a science of purely “social” relationships, which premises
that social order can be maintained regardless of the level and
distribution of economic gratifications, and thus treats economic
arrangements as “givens,” it is somewhat remote from the income-
reallocating strategies of the Welfare State. Yet its social utili-
tarianism may induce Functionalism to accept various kinds of
social rearrangements, including the Welfare State, that promise
to control or remedy the socially disruptive impact of individual-
istic market competition.

Sociological Functionalism’s emphasis on the role of moral values
and on the significance of morality more generally, often leads it
to locate contemporary social problems in the breakdown of the
moral system; for example, as due to defects in the systems of
socialization and as due to their failure to train people to behave
in conformity with the moral norms. To that extent, also, Func-
tionalism’s accommodation to the instrumental and technological
emphases of the Welfare State must be tensionful, requiring con-
siderable internal readjustment in its own traditional theoretical
emphases. Moral conceptions of social problems may lead to new

344 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

programs of education or training or even to an emphasis on the
importance of more effective police systems and punishment.
But this moral vision of social problems, however, does not readijv
lend itself to the instrumental management of adult populations
in industrial societies. It is, rather, technological conceptions of
and solutions to social problems that tend to proliferate with and
are demanded for the development of the Welfare State. The Wel-
fare State becomes infused with technological approaches to social
problems and becomes increasingly staffed by liberal tcchnologues.
It becomes the centralized planning board and funding agent for
numerous ad hoc technological solutions to modem social prob-
lems; these, in turn, are congenial to the working assumptions of
bureaucratic elites and the technostructure in the private sector
as well. On one of its sides, then, Functionalism, as a social
theory with an embedded vein of social utilitarianism, can and is
ready to adapt to the Welfare State; on another of its sides, how-
ever, as a theory with a focus on morality, it may be expected to
have difficulty in adapting to the technological and instrumental
emphasis of the Welfare State.

PRESSURE OF THE WELFARE STATE

It is basically only after World War II that Functionalism, in the
United States, began to give explicit support to the Welfare State
as a way to satisfy the need for action to regulate the economy
and to protect the society against the “international Communist
threat.” This entailed a fundamental change in the Functionalist
conception of government and the state. This ninety-degree turn
was also made possible by another element long embedded in
Functionalism. At a deep level in its own infrastructure. Func-
tionalism, like Positivism, has had an abiding conservative disposi-
tion to respect and accommodate to “the powers that be,” and thus
to accommodate to the state power, whatever its ideological and
social character.

The growth of the Welfare State has meant the emergence of
a new power in society with an ever growing number of personnel
and an increasing variety of social functions. What has most
directly linked this new state apparatus to the sociological estab-
lishment and brought sociologists into closer ties with it is its
vastly increased level of funding, some significant part of which

The Shift toward the Welfare State 345

is available to the social sciences and directly provides new career-
supporting resources. Functionalism’s acceptance of the Welfare
State, then, derives not only from the general reality but from the
immediate power of the Welfare State itself and, most particularly,
from its articulated and real support for sociology and the social
sciences. The social sciences increasingly become a well-financed
technological basis for the Welfare State’s effort to solve the
problems of its industrial society.

Above all, what one sees is a vast growth in the demand for
applied social science: the policy - oriented use of social science by
governments, both for welfare and warfare purposes, and by
industry, though on a considerably smaller scale, for purposes of
industrial management. The rate of institutional growth of the
social sciences in the past decade has, in consequence, approached
revolutionary proportions. This development hinges on the in-
creased level of government investment in the social sciences; the
sheer magnitude of these is itself worth documenting.

For example, in 1962 the U.S. federal government spent $118,-
000,000 in support of social science research. In 1963, $139,000,-
000 was spent. In igG/g $200,000,000 was spent. In the space of
three years, then, federal expenditures alone increased by about
seventy percent — and this, starting from a comparatively high ab-
solute level. It is not, however, only in large countries like the United
States that one secs this change. Even in small countries, such
as Sweden or Belgium, government expenditures have increased
greatly; in Belgium, for example, from 2.9 million dollars in 1961
to 4.8 million dollars in ig64. : For our purposes here, it suffices
to emphasize the gross features of the new situation: namely,
that there has occurred a world-wide and unprecedented growth
in social science funding, based largely on vast new resources
supplied by government.

This growth is of significance for sociological theory generally,
and for Functional theory in particular, because governments
expect that the social sciences will help solve ramifying practical
problems. In particular, it is expected that the social sciences will
help administrators to design and operate national policies, welfare
apparatus, urban settlements, and even industrial establishments.

In these new circumstances Functional theory is under great
pressure to change, quickly and radically. The applied social theory
now being sought to aid policy makers and administrators cannot
be one that merely shows how social arrangements that already
exist arc — manifestly or latently — for the best. What the state
apparatus now needs is a social theory that is focally, and not
peripherally, concerned with how conditions can be made better,
liow domestic problems can be reduced, how American power

346 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

abroad can be protected or extended. This raises problems for
Functionalism, however, not because it is unwilling, but because
certain of its central assumptions and traditional commitments
impede its application for such practical purposes.

Functionalism, at first, responded to this pressure, in some part,
by reemphasizing the concept of ch/sfunctions. A. R. RadclifTc-
Brown had early formulated a concept of ’‘dysfunction," but this
concept, it is notable, was given life in American sociology only
during World War II, in the context of a unified national effort
that mobilized many sociologists to help in solving the problems of
the national administrative systems; that situation required a
theory that could systematically help overcome social tensions, con-
flicts, and problems. Yet this conceptual shift toward concern with
‘‘dysfunctions’’ proved insufficient.

The demand on social science, today, to help in practical
problem-solving has generated pressures hostile to the assumption,
so fundamental to Functionalism, about the “cunning” of society.
Functionalists of diverse tendencies commonly assume that, when
problems arise in a group, there spontaneously emerge natural
“defense" or adaptive mechanisms that serve to restore order and
equilibrium. In the tradition of Comte, who decried deliberate inter-
vention in social systems, Functionalists usually have expected
that the order-maintaining mechanisms in society would work
best when they worked “spontaneously” — one of Comte’s favorite
eulogisms — that is, without rational planning and without deliber-
ate intervention. It was in this spirit that Functionalists cautioned
against the unanticipated consequences of purposive social action
in the midst of the Great Depression. But, at that time, sociology
was scarcely mobilized for national purposes. Today, however, it
is being heavily supported, and not to show how things work
spontaneously or naturally; it is being supported to show how
organizational management, through deliberate planning and
governmental intervention, can make things work better. As
Herman Kahn, who should know about these matters, has ob-
served: “It simply isn’t worth, say, $150,000 of anybody’s money to
find out that they are doing everything right.” 3 In response to this
new pressure for deliberate and rational policy-making, which
Functional theory has such difficulty with, there is now a rapid
growth of new theories, such as decision theory, cybernetics, and
operations research, that seek to do precisely this.

With the growing demand for theories that can guide applied
social science and facilitate decision-making, some of the most
basic assumptions of Functionalism are being placed under pres-
sure. For example, one of Functionalism’s basic methodological
precepts is that there are no “causes.” Functionalism thinks of

The Shift toward the Welfare State 347

systems as mutually interacting variables rather than in terms of
causes and effects. Functionalism’s elementary domain assumption
has always come down to this: everything influences everything
else. But Functionalism has had no theory about the weighting to
be assigned to different variables in the system. It has had no
theory about which variables are more, and which are less im-
portant in determining the state of the system as a whole.

Administrators want to be able to appraise the differential costs
and effects of intervening in different ways, at different points, and
with different kinds of leverage. They therefore need to know
which variables are more powerful. This is one reason why there
is today a growing interest in those American sociological statis-
ticians, such as Herbert Blalock, who are returning once again to
the problem of making causal inferences. Administrators cannot
be content with a theory such as Functionalism, which placidly
reassures them that “everything influences everything else.” To say
this is to say that one of the major domain assumptions of Func-
tionalism, the concept of functional interdependence, does not
suffice for purpose of application. It is likely, in consequence,
that this basic assumption of Functional theory will be ignored
increasingly. One begins to detect a certain musty odor coming
from Functional theory.

Functionalism has long tended polemically to oppose any theo-
retical model that stressed the primary importance of any one or
several forces or factors in producing social change. The develop-
ment of the Welfare State however, implies that there is a growing
readiness to cope with social problems by assigning special im-
portance to a special factor, the role of governance and the state.
It is especially notable, therefore, that Neil Smelser, one of Parsons’
former students and collaborators, when he seeks to formulate a
new “general theory of social change," assigns a new and special
importance to government:

If any variable were to be singled out as determining the long-term
direction of change (that is, type of outcome), this would be the status
of the social system's govcrnmcnt-and-control apparatus. As we have
seen, the initial impetus disposes the social system to some kind of
change, but this disposition is very indeterminate. The direction of
change depends at ever} - stage and in large part on the activities of the
governmcnt-and-control apparatus-its planning, its ability to mobilize
people and resources in periods of strain, and its ability to guide and
control institutional innovations.*

Smclscr’s formulation indicates that Functionalism is under and
is responding to pressure to transform itself into a sociological
version of Keynesianism.

348 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

This new pressure, however, is a source of strain on the theo-
retical model that Parsons and other Functionalists had developed
earlier. In particular, it is a strain on Parsons’ previous commit-
ment to a “voluntaristic schema” that identified moral values in-
ternalized in individual persons as the key source of energy inputs
into the social process, and which he later “circuited” into self-
maintaining “social systems.” In contrast to this, to accept the
Welfare State is to see the state or polity as the master source of
power and initiative in society and as the essential societal stabiliz-
ing factor. To be concerned with the Welfare State is also to
premise the existence of inherent social “imbalances” of a sort
that needs to be corrected, changed, rather than to assume there is,
fundamentally, a se/f-maintaining social system, as Parsons does
in his essential conception of the “social system.”

For these reasons, among others, there is an appreciable strain
between Parsons’ earlier system focus and his later commitments
to the Welfare State. As the last chapter indicated, and as our
reference to Smelser reiterates. Parsons and other Functionalists
are now prone to abandon older system assumptions and, instead,
to look upon the society as requiring some central management
stemming from the polity and government. Parsons’ earlier theo-
retical views were grounded in a personal reality, domain assump-
tions, and structure of sentiments derived from experience and
socialization in a successful pre-Welfare State. The voluntaristic
schema extolled individual striving, and the social system model
extolled spontaneously regulated patterns of cooperation; both are
idealized requisites of a "free enterprise system.” Both, in short,
are implicit generalizations from an image of a free market and a
“ laissez-faire ” economy that Parsons projected onto the society at
large. In effect, then, there was a tacit ideological apologetics in
Parsons’ early theory — in the implication that, if all social systems
would only operate like self-regulating enterprises in a market
economy, they would operate better — which is dissonant with an
acceptance of the Welfare State.

Despite his reference to the importance of a mutuality of gratifi-
cations, and despite even his later talk about “productivity,” Par-
sons’ fundamental concern had hitherto been primarily with the
morality, responsibility, and legitimacy of the system managers,
and not with the technical efficacy of the system or its success in
producing and distributing goods and sendees. Insofar as Parsons’
analysis bore on the efficacy of a system, it saw this as derivative
largely of two factors: first, the moral commitments and restraint
of the actors involved and, second, the spontaneity and self-regulat-
ing character of their relationship. This focus, however, remains
appreciably distant from the instrumental strategies of the Welfare

The Shift toward the Welfare State 349

State, which places its great emphasis on achieving goals through
fiscal and monetary management and income reallocations through
taxation.

The growth of the Welfare State and its increasing support of
the social sciences, therefore, exerts serious pressure on the social
sciences in a variety of ways. This new support largely derives from
increased governmental commitment to intervene deliberately in
society, whether one’s own or others, and whether directly through
the activities of the national government or indirectly through such
agencies as UNESCO or OECO. Governmental commitment to
deliberate intervention on the international level coincides with
the breakdown of the older forms of colonialism and imperialism,
with the competition between the United States and the Soviet
Union to control the form that industrialization will take in the
‘Third World,” as well as with the resultant bargaining power that
certain developing nations have, to constrain the major powers to
assist in their industrialization.

Governments also seek to intervene deliberately in their own
societies, as a consequence of: the pressure exerted by relatively
deprived social strata or regions, by the “lower” class, whether
Black or working or unemployed; a concern to even out and control
the oscillations of their economy and to maintain continuing eco-
nomic growth; and, finally, prevailing conceptions of justice and
equity. In response to these massive changes on a world scale, there
is a growing level of governmental management of society; largely
by channeling new funds into the social sciences, this has caused
important changes in the latter’s own local and national institu-
tions, which mediate — conveying, defining, and sometimes ampli-
fying — the new government pressures and opportunities. Thus,
directly and indirectly, from remote and from local influences, there
develop mounting pressures to change the theories and styles with
which sociolog)' today operates.

In addition to those already mentioned, these pressures have
certain other common tendencies. For one thing, they are aimed
at acquiring technological resources to facilitate planned and de-
liberate change in certain social conditions; in short, they entail
governmental commitment to certain social “reforms.” Second,
this commitment itself must also be justified. There are continuing
pockets of resistance to governmental intervention, partly in con-
sequence of the higher levels of taxation required to finance it and
partly because certain vested interests oppose some of the changes
sought. The state, therefore, does not only require a social science
that can facilitate planned intervention to resolve certain social
problems; it also requires social science to serve as a rhetoric, to
persuade resistant or undecided segments of the society that such

35 o The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

problems do, indeed, exist and are of dangerous proportions. Once
committed to such intervention, the state acquires a vested interest
of its own in “advertising" the social problems for whose solution
it seeks financing. In other words, the state requires social re-
searches that can expose those social problems with which the
state is ready to deal.

Prior to the state's assumption of increased control over them,
these various problems had been handled by other social groups or
agencies in the society, usually on a local, regional, or municipal
basis. So. as the centralized government on the national level
becomes involved in and seeks a mandate for the management of
these same social problems, it enters inevitably into competition
with the groups that had been traditionally responsible for their
management: it infringes upon and threatens their vested adminis-
trative interests in the control of these problems. There is, then,
a resultant competition between new and old forms, and between
higher and lower levels of problem management.

This creates a situation in which the new and higher levels have
an interest not only in exposing the existence of a social problem,
but also in unmasking the inadequacy of the older arrangements
for dealing with it and in undermining the local elites formerly in
charge of these arrangements, and whom the higher levels now
wish to displace or to bring under their own control. There is,
consequently, a tendency of the new and higher governmental
levels to foster what are. in effect "vittlttation" researches, studies
that analyze the effectiveness and. most especially, expose the
ineffectiveness of the elites and of the traditional procedures on
the lower, local levels. The upper apparatus of the Welfare State,
then, needs social research that will “unmask" their competitors:
it needs a kind of limitedly 'critical" research. 1

These interlocking needs of the Welfare State, however, are
deeply at variance with certain of the technical commitments of
Functional theory, as well as with certain aspects of its underlying
structure of sentiments. For example, the state's need now is for
instrumental!)- manageable techniques of solution, but Function-
alism has traditionally focused on the importance of moral ele-
ments that are not instrumental!)- manageable, short of totalitarian
superintendence. Moreover, as we have seen, Functionalism has
a persistently optimistic view of contemporary society, seeing it as
almost the best of possible worlds, and tends to deemphnsize the
pathologies and problems of modern society; hut the Welfare State
needs to bring some of these into focus, if only to mobilize support
for its programs. Functionalism tends to have a "positive" and
appreciative perspective, but the Welfare State requires, at very
least, a limited sort of critical sociology. These, then, are some of

The Shift toward the Welfare State 351

the important ways in which Functional social theory comes into
conflict with the requirements of the Welfare State, and in which
the Welfare State contributes to the crisis that is developing for it.
This crisis intensifies to the degree that the Welfare State provides
sociology -with improved support.

It is, in appreciable part, as a consequence of such support that
there has been, since the mid-igso’s, an intensification of work
that takes as its point of departure the analysis of “social problems,”
and which does not conceive of them as. secondary aberrations, but
unbegrudgingly assigns reality to them. Rather than see such social
problems simply as disruptions in order and stability, much of the
research on racial discrimination for example, sees it within a
framework concerned with the general inhibition or violation of
freedom and equality; this of course, it tacitly or overtly opposes.
The support for such social problem-oriented studies does not,
however, derive only from the material resources or funding of the
Welfare State, but also from the great civil rights struggles and the
closely connected “war on poverty” movement of the ig6o’s. Indeed,
in less than one decade a distinct specialization, “the sociology of
poverty,” has taken on a new lease on life. It has drawn to itself
a cluster of new recruits whose basic concern is to remedy the
problem and change the society. Although these impulses for
change are limited, they are, nonetheless, distinctly different in
emphasis from the order-oriented assumptions characteristic of
Functionalism. It is partly around this substantive issue that the
long-severed connections between sociology and economics have
begun to be mended, and that sociologists have begun to read more
economics than ever before. While most of these social problem
studies are fundamentally expressive of a sociological Keynesian-
ism, operating within the limits of the Welfare State, and while it is
thus not the spirit of C. Wright Mills that is abroad in them, it is
also clear that neither is it the spirit of Functionalism and Talcott
Parsons that manifests itself here.

CHANGE THEORY

The growth of the Welfare State entails, above all, a commitment
to certain social changes and, therefore, requires a fundamentally
different approach toward social change from that traditional to
Functional theory. The major locus of strain within Functional

352 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

theory, as a consequence, centers persistently on its analysis of
social change.

The Parsonsian treatment of social change manifests anew the
evident inconsistencies and the strains to which Functionalism has
been exposed almost from its beginnings. There are signs, however,
that the tension is becoming increasingly acute for Functionalists.
Most specifically, I shall suggest in the following that: (i) it is in
its treatment of social change that Parsonsianism will most likely
abandon some of its most fundamental domain assumptions and
that, most especially, it will manifest a tendency to shift abruptly
over to radically different domain assumptions, particularly those
of Marxism; and (2) that the pressure for this shift is mounting, to
the point where certain Functionalists are now, explicitly and
openly, attempting to solve problems in the analysis of social
change by deliberately borrowing from Marxism. In short, the
analysis of social change is increasingly leading Functionalism
toward a convergence with Marxism.

Rather than focus on change, Parsons’ analysis of social systems
long tended to emphasize that they are governed by self-maintain-
ing processes and to highlight the order-maintaining mechanisms
inherent in them. Along with this he had a pronounced and one-
sided tendency to conceive of conformity — with the expectations
of others and with the requirements of moral codes — as conducive
to the stability of social systems. The Parsonsian “social system” is
a social world with its own ramifying network of defenses against
tension, disorder, and conflict: pierce one, and another springs up,
ready to cushion shock. This system’s stability may be contingent,
but it is never precarious. What is stressed is its almost endless
capacity to absorb and nullify shock; what is painstakingly dis-
played is an intricate and interlocking network of mechanisms that
binds the system’s energy into itself, that swiftly and efficiently
distributes it to stress-points, and that never dissipates any of it.

The Parsonsian social system is one whose equilibrium, once
established, is conceived to be perpetual; whose essential reality
is believed to be its inner coherence, rather than the conflicts,
tensions, and disorders that are usually considered secondary dis-
turbances or aberrations and that are never seen to derive from the
necessary and inevitable requirements of social life; whose “actors”
are, like fresh blotters, ready and willing to absorb the ink of an
imprinting socialization, and who therefore need never be con-
strained, for they always act willingly, out of an inward motivation.
It is a social world where scarcity seems not to matter or intrude,
though, if acknowledged, it is always capable of being nicely
managed by moral codes; it is a world where men use power
benignly on behalf of the common interest and collective goals, and

The Shift toward the Welfare State 353

where power differences rarely tempt the stronger to take more
than morality dictates. The Parsonsian social system is, in brief,
a perpetual-motion machine.

In suggesting, as I have above, that Parsons does not conceive of
social conflicts and tensions as deriving from the necessary require-
ments of social life, I am talking about what Parsons implicitly
takes to be “real” in social systems : that is, about his most basic, if
rarely stated, domain assumptions concerning social systems. The
tendency of Parsons’ thought is to assume that it is possible not
to have these conflicts. Their existence is an entirely contingent
one, depending on how the stability-ensuring mechanisms work
at any moment. Conflicts and disorder are viewed not as part of
the necessary order of things; they are more nearly akin to the
fortuitous illnesses of the body than to the aging body’s certain
infirmity and inevitable death. Parsons operates with the assump-
tion that there is nothing necessarily in a social system that will
bring it to an end, seriously disrupt it, continuously subject it to
strain, or even radically change its structure from time to time. In
other words (and we shall probe this further in the next chapter).
Parsons has conceived of a social system that is immortal. It is, in
large part, because Parsons has been animated by a desire to
endow his "social system” with immortality that it is difficult for
him to understand the ways in which social systems must neces-
sarily and lawfully change, and it is why he is led, in The Social
System , c to a bleak pessimism about the very possibilities of under-
standing this.

ASPECTS OF PARSONS’ CHANGE ANALYSIS

If, as Parsons assumes, a stable system of interaction, once estab-
lished, tends to “remain unchanged,” then logically he also tends
to assume that changes in a social system arise from external
pressures that have somehow overwhelmed or penetrated the
system’s defenses, or from pressures that are random — in their
origin if not in their permeation — relative to the system’s essential
characteristics. The essential characteristics of the system will not
engender critical structural changes of the system, but only cyclical
or rhythmical changes in it. It seems no wonder, then, that in The
Social System Parsons says:

354 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

a general theory of the processes of change of social systems is not
possible in the present state of knowledge. . . . We do not have a com-
plete theory of the processes of change in social systems. . . . When
such a theory is available the millennium of social science will have
arrived. This will not come in our time and most probably never J

What must be noted here is the extreme pessimism, indeed the
despair, that Parsons manifests about a “complete’' theory of the
change of social systems. In order to make such despair seem
justifiable, Parsons changes the issue in the above quotation, talk-
ing first of a “general” and then of a “complete” theory. Surely a
general theory' is not necessarily a complete theory, unless by some
idiosyncratic definition of these terms. Surely a complete theory of
anything is rarely possible. And surely it is strange that Parsons —
Parsons of all people! — here holds that such a theory must wait
upon the prior development of knowledge. Why is it that a lack of
knowledge should bar development of a theory of the change in
social systems, but a similar lack of knowledge provides no impedi-
ment to Parsons’ theory of social system equilibrium and order?
Why is Parsons so bleak and hopeless about a theory of change, but
not about a theory of order? Why is it that Parsons, suddenly and
out of the blue, here adopts a Positivistic assumption to the effect
that theories must wait on prior knowledge, when he never does so
anywhere else?

The inconsistency of Parsons’ argument here contrasts oddly
with the depth of his pessimism. One is inevitably reminded of
Socrates doggedly trying to prove the immortality of the soul; all
one is sure of is the compulsiveness with which the point is being
made, and one suspects that logic is being placed in the service of
a prior impulse. The very thought of tackling the problem of system
change seems to induce a kind of shrill distress, much as it might
in a modem theologian called upon to discuss the nature of the
devil.

THE DRIFT TOWARD MARXISM

In The Social System Parsons does, nevertheless, present some
partial canons for analyzing social change. Interestingly enough,
these center on the concept of “vested interests,” around which
resistance to change is held to be organized. Parsons holds that, so
far as an effort to make “change” impinges on institutionalized

The Shift toward the Welfare State 255

patterns, “change is never just ‘alteration of pattern’ but alteration
by the overcoming of resistance.” 5 But it is not at all clear why
“vested interests” should only give rise to resistance to change, and
why they do not also promote tendencies for change as well. Nor
does Parsons systematically note that different parts of a social
system do not have an equal "vested interest” in its maintenance;
some have different degrees of functional autonomy, some have
more and some less of a vested interest in maintaining the system.
Moreover, is not Parsons’ statement that change takes place by
overcoming resistance an acknowledgment, albeit only a tacit
acknowledgment, that change takes place through conflict ? If men
have a vested interest in resisting change in order to maintain their
gratifications, will they not tend equally to labor for change which
•will expand their gratifications? And once this is postulated, has
there not then been postulated a cause, tending toward conflict,
inherent in social systems?

More generally, once Parsons takes the plunge and does confront
issues of social change, either in or of social systems, he seems
constrained to mobilize a totally new set of domain assumptions
concerning the character of social reality. His efforts to analyze
social change seem to lead him suddenly to enlist domain assump-
tions not only extrinsic to those he uses in analyzing order, but
contradictor)’ to them — and which he expresses in the Veblenian
notion of a “vested interest" and in the concept of a “resistance to
change.” One specific origin of the latter assumption is probably in
Freudian theory. What should also be mentioned is that this
specific assumption is common to Marxism as well. Parsons fails
to note that this assumption, which happily seems, at first, to be
consistent with and to account for the stabilizing tendency of
systems, is actually consistent as well with an inherent tendency
toward conflict; for, if there were no resistance to change, there
would not, in Parsons’ own view, be conflict. The very same tend-
ency that, in one circumstance, stabilizes systems leads, in other
circumstances, to their instability. The system is hoist by its own
petard.

But Parsons does not see this side of it. He tends, instead, to
mobilize different assumptions to account for stability and for
change, or, at least, to think of them as if they were different. It is
almost as if two sets of books were being kept, each operating under
different assumptions: one for the analysis of change, and another
for the analysis of social equilibrium. This was present even in
Parsons’ earlier analysis of “The Problem of Controlled Institutional
Change,” where he attempted to develop a strategy for coping with
conquered Germany after World War II.

In this analysis, Parsons stresses that: “The conception of a

356 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

completely integrated social system is a limiting case. Every at
all complex society contains very important elements of internal
conflict and tension.” But why only complex societies? why not
all social systems, even the simplest of them? Moreover, even
though there is a certain “realism” in acknowledging the existence
of such conflicts, this does not necessarily change Parsons’ assump-
tion concerning their character, for they are still not necessary
and intrinsic to the society. He does not say that every society
“generates” but that they “contain” conflicts, or “elements” of con-
flict. Parsons also notes, in this same article, that though one of
the sides in a social conflict may impede change, the other side may
be enlisted as an ally of change or the change efforts. In short, the
change process is, again, almost explicitly seen to entail a struggle
and conflict of some sort.

Parsons further comments that the most vulnerable point of
the Junkers is their economic base; their position in society, he
says, sounding like a Marxian journalist, can be attacked as a case
of exclusive class privilege. 8 Again, the conservatism of the German
civil service is also explained in class terms, being held to depend
on the “class basis of recruitment of the higher personnel.” 10 Even
Parsons, when he comes to the analysis of change, begins not
merely to acknowledge but, in fact, to stress the importance of class
structures, of vested interests, and of conflicts, and to stress them
in ways that are not intrinsically derivable from his theory of order.
At this juncture the theory manifests a modest but perceptible drift
in a Marxist direction.

As still another case in point, we might note his position con-
cerning the role of ideas, regarded from the standpoint of social
change. While his primary emphasis in the earlier Structure of
Social Action was on the interdependence of belief systems with
other variables, he now shifts to an emphasis on their “dependent”
character, even if continuing to insist formally on their inter-
dependence with other forces.

It is one of the important results of modem psychological and social
science that, except in certain particular areas, ideas and sentiments,
both on the individual and mass levels, are dependent manifestations
of deeper-lying structures-character structure and institutional struc-
ture . . . than independent determinants of behavior. 11

This conception, of the matter seems clearly convergent with the
position toward which Durkheim had been moving, in his analysis
of the place of moral beliefs in society; both imply a distinction
between superstructure and infrastructure that is similar to that
made by the Marxist.

There is, then, something sehismed in Parsons’ social theory.

The Shift toward the Welfare State 357

There is an unexpected hint of dualism in his view of the world.
On the one side, there is Parsons’ model of an immortal and un-
changing social system, his version of the changeless Platonic
Idea or Form. On the other side, there is his assumption that the
natural world of men is, in its appearance, changing and falling
away from the Eternal Model: “Every at all complex society con-
tains very important elements of internal conflict." 12 It is as if in
his theory of equilibrium Parsons speaks as a Comtian, but, when
he addresses himself to a theory of change, he is suddenly trans-
ported and mysteriously finds himself speaking with Marx’s voice.
No wonder, then, that he shuddered at the prospect of turning
from the analysis of equilibrium to that of social change. This
Marxist tendency is not at all a new one; it was manifested in
his The Social System as well as earlier, and it continues to be
found even in his more recent analyses of social change and
evolution.

DIFFERENTIATION: THE FORCES VERSUS THE
RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION

In his paper on “Some Consideration on the Theory of Social
Change,” Parsons focuses on social change as entailing a process
of differentiation. 13 By this he apparently means that social change,
in part, occurs through the development of new and distinct
arrangements and structures for performing certain functions.
With the emergence of newly differentiated structures certain of
the moral norms governing each unit change, as do the relation-
ships among them. “Differentiation” not only means a change in
the activities of some previously established unit; it also means a
loss of certain activities, of the right to perform them, of the
rewards and gratifications provided for performing them, and of
the power to perform them. This emphasis on “differentiation” is
reminiscent of Spencerian evolutionism, and Parsons’ rediscovery
of it is, indeed, coincident with his turn toward evolutionism
(which I shall discuss shortly). If, as Parsons asked in 1937, “Who
now reads Herbert Spencer?,” the answer in the ig6o’s must be,
Parsons himself.

Differentiation means the creation of a new unit, which assumes
the functions and powers of an older one; so the growth of the
new unit entails some loss and a threat of possible annihilation

358 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

to the old one. Because the new unit must impair the older’s vested
interests, it will be resisted, with resultant social conflict. Much of
this is not particularly new and is either already explicit or im-
plicit in The Social System. A somewhat new element becomes
manifest, however, when one asks, what conditions give rise to
differentiation and upon what does its successful completion
depend?

Parsons’ reply assumes that the process begins with some kind
of an “input deficit” with respect to goal-attainment, which, even
when successfully arrested, is tensionful. In other words, some
function is being performed; there is an expectation of some
service that one system is committed to supply, though it, for
some reason, is not performing satisfactorily. The recipient system
is therefore exerting pressure upon the supplying system; the
quantities, qualities, timing, or rates of exchange are thus made
problematic. The recipient system exerts pressure for more, better,
faster, or cheaper service than the supplying system, with its
established arrangement, has been providing. The recipient system
seeks to change the supplying system in some manner that
satisfies it.

It is important to note that this “imbalance” is simply taken as
“given” by Parsons. Since Parsons postulates that a social system
will remain in equilibrium so long as each party to it conforms
with the other’s expectations, the only way in which he can get
the system out of equilibrium is by sheer postulation. So he starts
here with the assumption that it is already out of equilibrium; one
of the parties is simply assumed not to be conforming with the
expectations of the other. Differentiation, then, as a form of social
change, is primarily a way in which the system adapts to and
copes with a prior but unexplained impairment of equilibrium.
There is, therefore, still nothing in the system itself that should
necessarily throw it out of equilibrium or lead one party to frustrate
the expectations of others. Disturbance is taken to be largely
fortuitous, relative to the system itself.

For my part, however, I have repeatedly suggested that this is
not the case; for example, there is an inherent tendency toward
the declining marginal utility of gratifications; an inherent
ambivalence in complying with even the morally sanctioned ex-
pectations of others; a greater readiness to demand conformity
with one’s own rights than with another’s; a selective support for
moral norms that are advantageous and a relative neglect of those
that are not; there are inherent consequences of power differences,
enabling the stronger to enforce his own moral expectations and
resist the weaker’s demands for such conformity, with resultant
“normalized repression”; and there is a general inclination of those

The Shift toward, the Welfare State ggg

disadvantaged to give less support to an existent arrangement for
the allocation of gratifications and to the moral code that sanctions
this. For Parsons, however, there is still nothing in a social system
that need inherently disturb its equilibrium.

For Parsons, moreover, successful differentiation is always a
process that remains subject to the social systems’ dominant values,
which are “the highest-order component of its structure .” 14 While
the ways in which the values are applied may be changed and while
the social units to which they are applied may also be changed,
Parsons emphasizes that his “whole discussion has been based on
the assumption that the underlying value-pattern of the system
does not change as a part of the process of differentiation .” 15 In
other words, he is dealing with only a limited type of differentiation,
institutionalized differentiation. He is dealing with a process of
differentiation that is compatible with a system’s primary value
commitments and that remains under control.

But under what conditions do proposed differentiations remain
under control? Suppose that established units resist their loss of
old functions and, moreover, have sufficient power to make their
resistance effective? The capacity to impose a shift of function
from an old to a new unit is presupposed by Parsons, which implies
that the shift is one within the power of those wishing to make it.
In short, institutionalized differentiations, of the sort to which
Parsons addresses himself, premise the maintenance of existent
power arrangements, and are thus implicitly limited to those found
acceptable by the powerful elites advantaged by them.

The course of a differentiation process will not develop equally
from every person’s experience of “input deficits.” Under most
conditions the “input deficits” of some will count for more than
those of others. The “input deficits” of some persons and groups
may long frustrate them and may fester without producing differen-
tiation, while others’ “input deficits” will lead to prompt and routine
efforts at differentiation. Blacks in the United States, for example,
have long experienced an “input deficit” with respect to the edu-
cation their children receive; this has long been frustrating to them
and long known of by others, but to this time there is no remedy
for this in sight. Moreover, such “differentiation” as did develop —
in short, discriminatory and segregated schooling — was developed
and is maintained in order to remedy the “input deficits” not of
Blacks but of Whites. Furthermore, this discriminatory pattern of
educational differentiation was always at variance with the egali-
tarian value system to which American society nominally sub-
scribes, but it will not be changed without violating the dis-
criminatory value system to which, in fact, many American Whites
do subscribe.

360 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

Underlying Parsons’ analysis of social' differentiation is an assump-
tion that there is some constant function that must be performed,
some unchanging need of the system as a whole that must con-
tinue to be satisfied. Increased differentiation is a way in which
this same system need is transferred from one to another unit, where
it is then better satisfied. The need that may produce social differ-
entiation, however, may not be that of the system as a whole, but
only of some part of the system. The crucial problem in transferring
system needs from an old to a new unit is surmounting the resistance
and vested interests of those advantaged by the established way of
meeting it. And this largely depends, first, on the latter's power to
resist, and, second, on their readiness and willingness to resist,
which, in turn, is a function of whether their access to gratifications
is either lost or imperiled, or improved and advantaged, by the im-
pending transfer. For, the point of transferring a function may not
be an improvement in the performance of the single system need or
even of the system as a whole; in other words, transfer of a function
may serve or aim not to improve the functioning of the group but to
improve the advantages of only some within it.

Differentiation, as Parsons views it then, is largely a way in
which social systems change in an “orderly” manner, without
changing the fundamental allocation of advantages, and thus
change, in short, in a manner acceptable or not threatening to
existent power-centers. Still, what is interesting about this analysis
is the extent to which it requires Parsons to accent his usual
assumptions differently, and the way in which this veers him closer
to a Marxist model. For example. Parsons’ analysis of differen-
tiation indicates that it begins in some conflict, entails threat, and
engenders resistance. If the social system does not inherently
entail conflict, change of system does. The supplying system is
viewed as being under pressure to employ either new devices, or
new arrangements for the use of old devices, to improve its per-
formance. One way to improve its challenged performance is to
assign it to another unit as a specialized function: to differentiate
the established system. Let us examine how this works. The system
under such pressure is presumably receptive to new devices that
would improve its performance; it either tries to create them or it
searches for those that have already been created elsewhere. If it
succeeds in inventing or borrowing a new device, it must then
arrange for its use within its own established system. To maximize
the effectiveness with which the new device may be used, the
system tends to create new kinds of organizational units, to which
it assigns responsibility for the functions that the new device per-
forms. But since the functions to be performed are not new, for
only the manner in which they are performed is being altered, they

The Shift toward the Welfare State 361

must have been previously performed by already existent units
within the social system. Therefore the "residual” unit has now lost
a function to the new unit; its vested interests are impaired, and
its continued access to its former facilities is thrown into question.

This model of change suggests certain parallels and begins to
converge with the Marxist conception, which holds that societal
change is brought about by a conflict between the forces and the
relations of production. In Marxism, it is conceived that new forces
of production (or functional "outputs”) are first developed or
acquired -within the existent relationships of production (for ex-
ample, the existent level of differentiation), but, at some point,
become incompatible with these and burst them asunder. What
Parsons has done, then, may be conceived of as generalizing the
Marxist change model from society to all social systems.

What seems to happen is that, as Parsons shifts from analyzing
the sources of system equilibrium to analyzing the sources of
system change, there is a noticeable but unacknowledged shift
from Comtian to Marxian domain assumptions, a shift toward a
new metaphysics, which presently remains unresolved. This leaves
the Parsonsian system operating dualistically. I would not, however,
wish to overstate the extent of Parsons’ shift in a Marxian direction.
It is clear that Parsons by no means drops all of his former assump-
tions, even when he comes to analyze change; manifestly different
ones are accented, and new ones make their appearance at that
point, but it is also certain they do not have unchallenged control
of the analysis, and they are assimilated into the older infra-
structure of his theory.

For example, Parsons’ analysis of differentiation transforms the
Marxist mechanism of revolution — the conflict between the forces
and relations of production — into a mechanism of evolution. The
tension between the old residual unit and the newly differentiated
one is viewed as remaining under central control. There is a
“gray flannel" competition rather than a violent conflict between
the units. Considered as a “myth of origins,” the Parsonsian theory
of social differentiation could be seen in the image of asexual
reproduction: of a thing dividing itself but still remaining one
thing; of a formless protoplasm gradually dividing itself but re-
maining integrated.

362

The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

THE PARSONS-MARX CONVERGENCE
IN EVOLUTIONISM

It is precisely with respect to issues of social change that Parsonsian
theory is most unstable, and thus is constrained to converge with
models most at variance with its dominant commitments. This
was once again indicated by Parsons’ sudden turn toward evolu-
tionism in the mid-i 960’s. That this was less a matter of the
immanent internal development of Parsons’ previous commitments,
and more a matter of adapting to pressures in the intellectual
surround — as well as to the pressures that produced these — is
suggested by the opening remarks in his article on “Evolutionary
Universals in Society.” “Slowly and somewhat inarticulately,” says
Parsons, “emphasis in both sociological and anthropological
quarters is shifting from a studied disinterest in problems of social
and cultural evolution ... to an evolutionary framework.” 1 ' - ' In
short, Parsons noticed a gap between intellectual developments
surrounding his own theoretical system, and he moved toward
evolutionism to reduce the tension by “assimilating” it into his own
system.

The focus of Parsons’ effort here is his concept of “evolutionary
universals,” which he defines as “structural innovations" that
“endow their possessors with a very substantial increase in general-
ized adaptive capacity, so substantial that species lacking them are
relatively disadvantaged in the major areas in which natural
selection operates, not so much for survival as for the opportunity
to initiate further major developments.” 17 An evolutionary uni-
versal is an innovation so “important to further evolution that,
rather than emerging only once, it is likely to be ‘hit upon ’ by
various systems operating under different conditions.” 18 This view
of evolutionary universals as first arising under unspecified, “differ-
ent” conditions suggests, as is, in fact, borne out by his entire
analysis, that Parsons has no explanation of how they originate,
of the conditions under which they do or do not occur. The origin
of evolutionary universals is, in effect, seen as random mutation;
their significance derives from their fortuitous creation of an in-
crease in generalized adaptive capacity, which enables the innova-
tion to survive, whatever the causes that first led it to emerge.

Although it is only implicit, there is a tacit “two-stage” sequence
in Parsons’ evolutionary model. Most specifically, there is a begin-
ning or starting stage that is essentially that of primitive or tribal

The Shift toward the 'Welfare State 363

society. This is characterized by the dominance and pervasiveness
of kinship institutions; as Parsons notes, social status is here
largely ascribed to “criteria of biological relatedness.” :5 This phase
is largely an unanalyzed residual category, and only the starting
point for subsequent development or evolution; it is that vrhich
must be broken out of for the second, equally amorphous, stage to
begin. This second stage is everything that comes afterward — after
the “seamless web of kinship” has been disrupted — and it is here
that “evolutionary universals” develop. In short, all of “history,” in
effect constitutes one and the same stage, after and relative to
the breakdown of tribalism.

This breakdown occurs, in part, as a consequence of the appear-
ance and operation of certain evolutionary universals. Two evolu-
tionary universals, says Parsons, are most closely related to “the
process of “breaking out’ of what may be called the 'primitive’ stage
of societal evolution.”” These are, first, a system of explicit cultural
legitimation of differentiated societal functions (particularly, polit-
ical functions) apart from kinship and, second, “the development
of a well-marked system of social stratification.” More than that.
Parsons also assigns priorities between these two starting mecha-
nisms. “I am inclined to think." he adds, “that stratification comes
first and is a condition of legitimation of political function.” 1

Once again, this is surprisingly reminiscent of Marxism, and
particularly of Marx’s and Engels's discussion of social evolution
in the Communist Manifesto. Here, Marx began by holding that
“the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles,” to which Engels — in the English edition of iSSS —
appended a footnote, holding that this referred to “all written
history.” Engels then pointed out that in 1S47. when the Com-
munist Manifesto had been written, the “pre-history of society . . .”
was all but unknown, but that, after that time, Haxtausen. Maurer,
and Morgan had published their work analyzing the importance of
communal land ownership as the foundation for the development
of the Teutonic tribes, and of the nature of the gens and its relation
to the tribe. ‘With the dissolution of these primaeval communities,
socle tv begins to be differentiated into separate and Snallv antago-
nistic classes.^

Engels, then, made a basic distinction between the stage of (1)
prehistory or primeval societies and (2) all subsequent written
history, that is akin to Parsons’ distinction between the primitive
and post-primitive stages. Engels, in effect, also operated with a
land of “two-stage” theory, holding that the stages of evolution to
which Marx gave detailed analysis were, in effect, sub-stages
located in the second, “historical” stage. Parsons, again like Engels,
also assigns special importance to the role of social stratification

364 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

in disrupting tribal societies, although his conception of social
stratification differs substantially from that of Marx and Engels.

In addition to an explicit system of cultural legitimation and
a well-marked system of social stratification. Parsons also focuses
on four other “evolutionary universals”: a markets and money
system, bureaucracy, a universalistic legal system, and democratic
associations. One of the most surprising lacunae in Parsons’
analysis of evolutionary universals is the scant mention that he
makes here of science and of technology. It is strange that these
are not given emphatic mention as “evolutionary universals,” for it
seems obvious that they, no less than those mentioned, also produce
a “very substantial increase in generalized adaptive capacity.”
Science and technology are mentioned in conjunction with the
evolutionary universals only incidentally, in two brief sentences
just a paragraph before the end of the entire article. Here it is
acknowledged that they are as important for modern society as the
last four evolutionary universals mentioned above, although they
themselves are not stated to be “evolutionary universals.” Why is
this so?

An answer to this question, I believe, must proceed on two
levels, one having to do with Parsons’ technical analysis of evolu-
tion and the analytic distinctions that it involves, and a second
having to do with the ideological character of Parsons’ discussion,
which itself is not independent of the first level but provides an
infrastructure for it. As to the technical level: prior to his specifi-
cation and direct analysis of the six evolutionary universals, Parsons
makes an anterior distinction, differentiating what he calls the
“pre-requisites for socio-cultural development” 23 from the “evolu-
tionary universals.” It is in these “pre-requisites” that Parsons
locates technology, along with three others : language, kinship, and
religion. Considerable (and characteristic) emphasis is given to
the significance of religion. Cultural patterns, he holds, are
“properly conceived in their most fundamental aspect as ‘religious’
... I am inclined to treat the entire orientational aspect of culture
itself, in the simplest least evolved forms, as directly synonymous
with religion.” 2 * These four “pre-requisites,” then, religion, com-
munication through language, kinship organization, and tech-
nology, says Parsons, constitute the “very minimum that may be
said to mark a society as truly human.” Indeed, “no known human
society has existed without all four in relatively definite relations
to each other.” 25

Thus one formal reason that Parsons cannot allow technology
to be an “evolutionary universal” is that he has previously defined
it as a “pre-requisite.” Presumably it cannot be both. Yet to deny
that it can be both is arbitrary and contradictory; Parsons’ own

The Shift toward the Welfare Stale 365

definition of an evolutionary universal, after all, simply holds that
it is an innovation that produces a very substantial increase in
generalized adaptive capacity, and technology is precisely the most
generalized producer of "adaptive capacity.” This is one of the main
reasons that it can be diffused, with relative ease, among societies
otherwise quite different. In short, technology has a relath'ely high
degree of functional autonomy both between and within social
systems. 1 ’ 1 The higher the level of technology, the more there is of
a generalized adaptive capacity, at least of the same sort that
results from any of the innovations that Parsons characterizes as
evolutionary universal. Technology is a producer of generalized
adaptive capacity in society in at least two important ways. First,
it is a source of non-zero-sum gratifications; men "playing a game
against nature" may use technology to increase the total assets
available for distribution among themselves, thus making it easier
for each to obtain increased gratifications without reducing the
gratifications of the others. They thereby reduce the pressure to
reorganize the system of stratification, and, to that extent, heighten
system loyalties and stability. Second, technology is a major source
of jxmer. enabling systems that have higher technologies to com-
pete more effectively against and impose themselves on those with
lower technologies.

In his general concept of "pre-requisites." Parsons once again
partially “converged" with Marx and Engels; and. although limited,
it is a noteworthy convergence. In The German Ideology — and
particularly m their critique of Fcurbach — Marx and Engels stress
the importance of certain "aspects" of social activity, or of certain
"moments." These, they insist, arc not different stages of evolution
but "have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history . . . and
still assert themselves in history today.'"" The first of these
moments, they assert, is that men must be in a position to live in
order to be able to make history, having a certain physical constitu-
tion, men need food and shelter, so their first historical act is the
production of the means to satisfy these needs; they produce tools
or means of production. Second, the satisfaction of one need
creates new needs, presumably those devolving around production
and technology.

The third circumstance which, from the very first, enters into histori-
cal development is that men . . . begin to make other men, to propagate
their kind; the relation between man and wife, parents and children,
the FAMILY. The family which to begin with is the only social relation-
ship. becomes later ... a subordinate one.-*'

In connection with their discussion of these universal “moments,”
Marx and Engels also stress the importance and antiquity of lan-

366 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

guage and religion: “Language is as old as consciousness, language
is practical consciousness, as it exists for other men.”- 0 Central to
this consciousness is a consciousness of nature, which, at first,
appears as an all-powerful alien force: "... a purely animal con-
sciousness of nature” (natural religion). We see here immediately:
this natural religion or animal behaviour towards nature is
determined by the form of society and vice versa.” At this point,
then, several things are quite clear: first, that what Marx and
Engels speak of as “moments” of social activity that always assert
themselves in history, is the same kind of analytical category as
the “pre-requisites” for social development of which Parsons speaks;
and, second, we may also note that there is a considerable similarity
in the specific things included in their parallel categories.

Despite this notable similarity, however, there are a number of
important differences in their treatment of these pre-requisites or
moments, of which I shall here only mention one. This, of course,
centers on the special importance attributed by Marx and Engels
to the forces of production, including (but not confined to) tech-
nology. While acknowledging the fundamental importance of the
family, while stressing the significance of language and communi-
cation, while noting the interaction between society and religion,
nonetheless, Marx and Engels assign a kind of priority to produc-
tive forces, distinguishing them from the other “pre-requisites” or
“moments." Parsons does not do this, although, given his own
assumptions, there are reasons for doing exactly that. After all,
Parsons does assign special importance to those innovations that
increase a society’s generalized adaptive capacity, which is precisely
what the growth of productive forces and technology do; moreover,
these grow relatively autonomously, cumulatively, and at increas-
ingly rapid, if uneven, rates. But, rather than acknowledge that
technology has important differences in this respect from language,
kinship, and religion, Parsons submerges it among these other “pre-
requisites” in a way that obscures its special character as an
unusually important source of generalized adaptiveness.

That he does this undoubtedly derives, in some part, from his
abiding polemical commitments against Marxism, 30 and against
any other theoretical model that assigns special importance to one
or a few factors. But there is, I suspect, another, more narrowly
ideological problem that Parsons faces in the present case and
which disposes him to play down the significance of technology.
This can be seen by reviewing the specific factors that Parsons
defines as evolutionary universes, and most particularly, those that
he regards as fundamental to the structure of modem societies.
These, he holds, are “bureaucratic organization . . . money and

The Shift toward the Welfare State 367

market systems, generalized universalistic legal systems, and the
democratic association with elective leadership.” 31 What this im-
plies is that the “free enterprise system” of American society is a
uniquely powerful embodiment of all the important evolutionary
universals that, according to Parsons, have ever been invented.
That is, it implies that the United States of America represents the
apex of evolutionary development, that it is the most advanced of
modern nations.

While Parsons does not state this explicitly, he does directly
argue one central implication of such a viewpoint; namely, that
the United States’ chief world competitor, the Soviet bloc of nations,
lacking certain of these evolutionary universals, is inherently un-
stable and can be no match for the United States. Speaking of the
market complex. Parsons holds that "those that restrict it too
drastically are likely to suffer from severe adaptive disadvantages
in the long run.” 3 - And “in the long run” — as the Marxist formu-
lation also puts it — adds Parsons, “communist totalitarian organi-
zation will probably not match ‘democracy’ in political and
integrative capacity ... it will prove to be unstable.” 33 In effect,
then, Parsons uses his concept of “evolutionary universals” to
demonstrate the superiority of the American system over the
Russian. Now, if Parsons explicitly included technology, science,
and general productive forces among his evolutionary universals,
this ideologically resonant conclusion could by no means be as
readily drawn as it is; that political inference would certainly be
dubious, indeed, if special importance were assigned to technology.
For, at the very least, the Russian buildup of “generalized adaptive
capacity” through technology has been tremendous in the last fifty
years, and the rate at which it has grown considerably outdistances
that of America in that same period.

Behind the conceptual shuffling of evolutionary universals and
“pre-requisites,” then, there is an effort to deal out an ideologically
strong “hand” for the United States and its social system; but, to
do this, technology was a card that had to be assigned a low value.
This can, I suppose, be appreciated by those with a taste for
theoretical games. Sdll, one cannot but be half-amused (and half-
amazed) that in a discussion of evolution, with its fundamental
concern for what is surviving and what is not, anyone could have
missed the fact that, in just fifty years, the Marxist-socialist nations
have come to control half the world.

What Parsons’ theory of evolutionary universals does is to give
the West a consolation prize: a theoretical “victory” in place of a
socio-political, real one. Now, at last. Parsons has turned the tables
on Marx’s “death prophecy” for capitalist societies; Parsons can

368 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociolog)'

hold that it is their social system, not ours, that will be buried by
history. Marx’s death prophecy has not only been "refuted,” but a
kind of retribution has been exacted.

SMELSER AND MOORE: THE FUNCTIONALIST
CONVERGENCE WITH MARXISM

The analysis of social change leads Parsons repeatedly in the
direction of Marxist assumptions and models, even as he continues
to conduct a polemic against them. This tendency is less am-
bivalently and much more openly expressed today among other
Functionalists. Increasingly, Functionalists are now moving toward
a convergence with Marxism and are often doing so with un-
conflicted self-awareness. Not only is Marx referred to more and
more often in the recent work of Functionalists, but they are also
becoming openly appreciative of his work, although scarcely un-
critical. Thus Wilbert E. Moore remarks:

Some Marxian analysis was by no means as mechanical and mindless
as it has been depicted at times, for Marx took fairly full account of
the purposive character of social action — and not solely in his theory of
revolutionary change. The Marxist position . . . did emphasize interplay
of systemic elements and the dynamic consequences. Marx’s intellectual
heirs were never quite caught up in the extremes of static “functional-
ism” that came to represent a dominant theme in anthropological and
sociological theory. 34

Thus Moore makes it explicit that the deepest tensions in Func-
tional theory derive from its analysis of social change, and it is in
connection with this that his attitude toward Marxism becomes
more appreciative. 35

In his “Toward a General Theory of Social Change,” Neil Smelser
clearly indicates that Moore’s recent work entails a move toward
a convergence with Marxism.-

Like a Marxist, [Moore] views conflict and tension as normal and
ubiquitous; but unlike a Marxist, he sees this as stemming from a
variety of sources. . . . Like a classical functionalist, he sees social
adjustment as responsive to disruptive influences; but unlike a classical
functionalist, he does not assume that the adjustments necessarily
reduce the tension — indeed, changes may generate even greater conflict
and tension. 38

The Shift toward the Welfare State 3^9

In a similar vein, Smelser’s own analysis in this same essay spends
considerable time attempting to codify the Marxist theory of
change and deliberately to unite it with his own reinterpretation of
Functionalism, while, at the same time, differentiating his own
views from those of "classical” Functionalism. That the con-
vergence between Marxism and Functionalism in Smel sers work
is not only a central but also a self-conscious effort is evident
throughout his last essay, most particularly in his concluding re-
marks: “Hopefully this strategy may work toward overcoming the
explanatory shortcomings of the classical functionalist and classical
Marxist approaches.” 37 There are, then,- in both Moore and Smelser
indications of the potential development of a kind of ‘left
Parsonsianism.”

T6 sum up, thus far: I have held that Functionalism — the most
influential theoretical standpoint in contemporary Academic Soci-
ology as a whole — is undergoing a deepening crisis. Much of this
crisis is precipitated by the sharp emergence of the Welfare State.
For, while there are structures deep in Functionalism that dispose
it to ally itself with the Welfare State, there are also important
ways in which it has considerable difficulty in adapting to the
change-promoting requirements of the Welfare State. In its
“classical” or “static" form, Functionalism cannot provide the
Welfare State with the kinds of intellectual resources that are
required. In one way, then, the crisis of Functionalism is a crisis
internal to it. In its Parsonsian form, Functionalism is ready to ally
itself with the Welfare State, but, at the same time, however, it
lacks the intellectual tools and the deep-lying impulse to deal with
the problems of social change so central to the Welfare State. In
another way the crisis entails a tension between the Welfare State
and many important aspects of the subculture and intellectual
tradition of Functionalism. Futhermore, the enormous growth of
the Welfare State has directly funneled vast new funding into
sociology and the other social sciences. Functional Sociology has,
thus, not only been exposed to tension-producing constraints, but
also to new opportunities that have been no less tension-producing.
Finally, I have also suggested that the central locus of this tension
in Functional theory is in its ways of dealing, or not dealing, with
social change. Functionalism’s drift toward a convergence with
Marxism is an effort to cope with the tensions it feels in this
intellectual area, as well as an indication of the mounting crisis it
is undergoing.

That this growing crisis of Functionalism is vitally related to the
growth of the Welfare State means that it is related to social de-
velopments of the utmost power and continuing significance. It

370 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

thus means that Academic Sociology as a whole will itself be
subjected to powerful forces that may change it profoundly. There
will be changes produced within Functional Sociology that will
ramify outward into Academic Sociology and to which other in-
tellectual standpoints also will have to adjust. To the extent that
Functionalism loses its hold on the intellectual terrain, this will
provide competing standpoints with important new growth oppor-
tunities, and this in turn, will intensify the crisis for Functionalism.
Again, by reason of the direct support that the Welfare State gives
to the “social problem” sociologies compatible with state interests
(yet still competitive with the interests of Functionalism), it will
weaken the latter’s position and exacerbate the tensions present in
Academic Sociology more generally. In the chapters that follow,
some of these complications will be given closer examination. An
attempt will be made to elaborate a larger variety of the indications
and of the sources of the crisis in Functional social theory and
Academic Sociology today.

It is noteworthy, particularly from the standpoint of a general
interest in how social theory itself changes, that none of the
changes discussed have derived from the accumulating empirical
basis of sociology. There is really no evidence that the changes that
Functionalism has already manifested and promises to further
undergo — for example, its drift toward Marxism — have anything
whatsoever to do with the researches and the findings these have
produced, either within or outside of the framework of Functional
theory, since Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action was published
in 1937. If we may regard our analysis here as an intensive case
study of how one social theory changes, there is no evidence that
it changes in the way that the conventional "methodological model”
suggests it does, namely, out of its interaction with or as a response
to new data. It is not the data that are changing Functionalism in
any significant respect; and, indeed, the very problems that Func-
tionalism is attending to now are themselves not new. What has
happened is that old data and old problems have, largely for
reasons exogenous both to the theory and research of sociology,
come to be assigned new value, significance, and reality. In
short, the relationship between the technostructure and the in-
frastructure of sociology has changed and has become increasingly
tension-laden largely because of changes in the latter. This, pri-
marily, is why major theoretical changes are now occurring and
impending.

The Shift toivard the Welfare State

37i

NOTES

1. For fuller discussion, see my Introduction to E. Durkheim, Socialism ,
A. W. Gouldner, ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1962), pp. 7-31.

2. On this and other comparative data, see The Social Sciences and the
Policies of Governments (Paris: Organization for Economic Development,
1966).

3. The New York Times Magazine, December 1, 1968 p. 106.

4. N. J. Smelser, Essays in Sociological Explanation (Englewood Cliffs.
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 278.

5. For a detailed application of these considerations to the tradition of
“deviant” behavior study, largely led by Howard S. Becker, see A. W. Gould-
ner, ‘The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State,” American
Sociologist (May 1968).

6. T. Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1951).

7. Ibid., p. 534. (Italics mine.)

8. Ibid., p.491.

9. T. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press,
1949). P- 325-

10. Ibid., p. 326.

11. Ibid., p. 336.

12. Parsons, The Social System, p. 317.

13. Rural Sociology, XXVI, No. 3 (September 1961), 219-239. Reprinted
in Social Change, A. Etzioni and E. Etzioni, ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1964).

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. T. Parsons, “Evolutionary Universals in Society,” American Sociological
Revieiv, XXIX, No. 3 (June 1964), 339.

17. Ibid., p. 356.

18. Ibid., p. 339.

19. Ibid., p. 342.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Handbook of Marxism, E. Burns, ed. (New York: International Pub-
lishers, 1935), pp. 22-23.

23. Parsons, “Evolutionary Universals in Society,” p. 356.

24. Ibid., p. 341.

25. Ibid., p. 342.

26. For data and discussion bearing directly on this issue, see especially
(but not exclusively) Chapter four of A. W. Gouldner and Richard A. Peter-
son, Technology and the Moral Order (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).
I take it that this stress on the relative autonomy of technology is consistent
with and, at least, implicit in Marx's emphasis on the importance of, at some
point, the conflict between the forces and relations of production. This rela-
tive autonomy of technology is one of the reasons that it is possible for it
to conflict with the relations of production.

27. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York:
International Publishers, 1947), pp. 17-18.

28. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

29. Ibid., p. 19.

30. The abiding character of this polemic and, in particular, its special
relevance to the analysis of societal evolution, from Parsons’ standpoint,
may be noted in the closing comments in his monograph, Societies, Evolu-
tionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1966), p. 115. He remarks, “Once the problem of casual imputation is formu-
lated analytically, the old chicken and egg problems about the priorities of
ideal and material factors simply lose significance. I hope that the present

3 72 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

treatment of the problems of societal evolution, though brief, will help lay
to rest this ghost of our nineteenth-century intellectual past.”

31. Parsons, “Evolutionary Universals in Society,” p. 356.

32. Ibid., p. 350.

33. Ibid., p. 356.

34. Wilbert E. Moore, Order and Change (New York: John Wiley and
Sons, 1967), P- 7 -

35. See also the following appreciative remarks by Moore: Marx’s analysis
was ... in effect far more sociological than that of his predecessors . .
Marxian and Weberian interpretations remain significant and controversial
. . .” (ibid., p. 35). “Marx correctly observed . . .” (ibid., p. 46). “His position
is a useful basis for discussion. . .” (ibid., p. 123). “Certain points in the
Marxian tradition have had a continuing viability . . .” (ibid., p. 298).

36. Smelser, Essays in Sociological Explanation, p. 279.

37. Ibid., p. 280.

CHAPTER

The Coming Crisis of
Western Sociology , II:

The Entropy of Functionalism
and the Rise of New Theories

The impending crisis of Academic Sociolog}- is, in some part, bom
of its success in the larger world, as the impending crisis of Func-
tionalism is bom of its success within Academic Sociolog}-. Our
national survey of American sociologists in 1964 revealed that an
overwhelming majority of them, indeed, some eighty percent, were
favorably disposed toward Functional theory. In that sense,
Kingsley Davis’s Presidential Address to the American Sociological
Association in 1959 was quite right in saying that Functionalism
and Academic Sociolog}- had become one. 1 If I understand Mr.
Davis’s argument properly, he seems to hold that there is now-
nothing validly distinctive about Functional analysis, and that
whatever validity there was to Functional analysis is now- common
to all sociological analysis. Where the two still differ, he suggests,
it is to the discredit of Functional analysis, being expressive of the
latter's merely philosophical assumptions, which lack scientific
validity.

Looked upon not in terms of the validity of its arguments, but
rather as a symptom of the state of Functionalism as a school of
thought, Davis’s thesis implies that the boundaries between Func-
tionalism and other schools have become difficult to discern. It is
quite clear that Davis’s article was not announcing a marriage
betweeen Functionalism and other sociologies; it was, rather, a
notification that a wake was to be held for Functionalism as a
distinctive school. Davis’s comments are significant, then, not
merely because they directly argue that Functionalism has lost its
distinctiveness, but also because, as a polemic against his former

373

374 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

Functionalist colleagues, they are in themselves a symptom of
much the same boundary-dissolving drift in Functionalism. Essen-
tially, Davis’s article is an expression of his defection from Func-
tionalism. This is no small event, considering that Davis was one
of the earliest and best known adherents of Functionalism. Davis’s
arguments express the cleavages, challenges, and crisis that await
Functionalism in its hour of triumph.

In contrast to Smelser’s and Moore’s critique of Functionalism
from the “left,” Davis’s renunciation of Functionalism — or, as he
quite correctly calls it, the “Functionalist movement” — expresses
what one might call a critique of Functionalism from the "right.” It
is a critique that belabors Functionalism for its lack of "detach-
ment” (again, quite correctly), which he sees from the methodo-
logical perspective of a more Postivist standpoint. The importance
of Davis’s critique for us, however, is that it is one of many indi-
cations of the growing variability and individuation, manifested
even by the pre-World War II generation of Parsons’ students. That
Davis could emphasize the indistinguishability of Functionalism
and sociology is, in part, due to the spreading influence of Function-
alism, but also to the fact that through its growing internal vari-
ability it does, indeed, become more difficult for it to maintain its
intellectual coherence and the clarity of its own theoretical bound-
aries. In short, it is, in some ways, growing difficult to see — at
least with casual inspection — a difference between Functionalist
and other sociologists, not because there do not remain modal
differences between them, but because Functionalists manifest an
ever larger variability around their central tendencies. In some
part, this is an expression of the entropy of Functionalism and is
another indication of its impending crisis.

ENTROPY AND THE SEED GROUP

The entropy of Functionalism derives, in one part, from its very
success and influence. As is true of other standpoints, it was easier
for Functionalism to maintain the clarity of its own distinctive
commitments while it was a minority view, in opposition; but
having come into respectable eminence, its new position exposes it
to pressures that dilute its distinctiveness.

If nothing else, the success of Functionalism has meant an in-

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 375

crease in the sheer number of its productive adherents. This
quantitative increase by itself should be expected to engender
greater variability in its theoretical posture. Such variability, more-
over, is all the more likely to develop since its adherents, new and
old, are individualistic intellectuals who are impelled to win their
place by competitively distinguishing themselves from one another
and by expressing their intellectual differences publicly.

There are, however, other sources from which the growing
entropy of Functionalism derives. These are related to the fact that
Parsonsian Functionalism was diffused by a "seed group” that,
from its very beginnings, manifested tendencies toward individual
variability. Several characteristics of this seed group are worth
mentioning here. First, they have been a prolific training cadre.
This is easily overlooked, in focusing on their work as researchers,
writers, and publishers. Within a surprisingly small time since the
late 1930’s, they themselves have trained not one but several
generations, who, in turn, have trained succeeding generations.
Variability in the work of Functionalists has thus been heightened
not only by the competitive individualism of the original seed
group, but also by that of the younger generations, and by the
tensions between them and their elders, and by the intra- and
cross-generational borrowing and diffusion of their individual
innovations.

A second characteristic of the original seed group, conducive to
the growing entropy of Functionalism, is that it achieved national
academic prominence at what, compared with European possi-
bilities, was a relatively early age. They attained prominence while
still young and intellectually productive. They are presently very
much alive and active, writing and publishing, and are exposed to
the growing variability in the work of their own generation’s peer
group, as well as that of their students’. Their own work thus grows
more individuated in character, interests, and style; and, because
of their eminence, this validates the individuation of the younger,
lesser-known men, and contributes to the boundary-attenuating
variability of the Functionalist school as a whole. 2

Because the Functionalist seed group was relatively young when
it achieved national professional prominence, it was subjected to
still other variability-engendering pressures. For one thing, they
early achieved almost all the rewards that the sociological establish-
ment could give them. Many of them have already been President
of the American Sociological Association, even though they are still
in their prime. This seed group has been so early and so thoroughly
honored in this way that one would be hard pressed to find others
in it upon whom to bestow this prize. As a result of their youthful

376 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

success, there is very little more with which their own professional
community can meaningfully reward them, even supposing they
still retained an appetite for further honors.

This, in turn, suggests that their professional community has a
dwindling set of social controls that it can exert upon them to
limit their individuality. Correspondingly, it also means that these
still productive men may tend to look elsewhere for their rewards —
beyond the confines of their own professional community — to
different professions, to new problem areas, and to new reference
groups within public life. Here indeed, there are still "new worlds
to conquer.” But this, in turn, can only further augment the
variability of their intellectual production.

As a final source of the increasing variability of the Parsonsian
seed group, brief mention might be made that, vigorous though
they are in so many ways, they are still older than they once were.
They are now thus surely looking at their work in the light of a
different structure of sentiments and a different “personal reality”
or experience than they had in their youth. Their new work is
subject to new conditions of the most intimate and personal
character. It is shaped by the long backward look as well as by the
shorter prospect before them. While looking backward to their
youth, they are also looking forward to their historical future. Some
will use the time they have to more deeply imprint, sharpen, fix the
public image they leave behind them; some will mellow and grow
more tolerant of intellectual differences, seeking to enjoy the
present without rancorous polemic; some will drift still further
away from the public life of their professional community and will
bend all their efforts, in Hemingwayesque morality, “to get their
work done.” All this is bound to have still further individuating
results that will heighten the variability of their forthcoming work,
and reduce the coherence of Functionalism and the clarity of its
boundaries. These, then, are among the endogenous sources of the
impending crisis of Functionalism as a distinct intellectual sub-
culture.

THE DISAFFECTION OF THE YOUNG

Another source of the crisis in the offing for Functionalism is
suggested by an examination of the differences in the ages of those
sociologists who are most favorably, and least favorably, disposed

Entropy of Functionalism , — Rise of Flew Theories 377

toward it. As previously mentioned, the national survey of American
sociologists conducted by Timothy Sprehe and myself asked them
to express their agreement or disagreement with the statement:
“Functional analysis and theory still retain great value for con-
temporary sociology.” We found that, for the group as a whole, the
replies were overwhelmingly favorable. Yet it is notable that not
all age groups were equally favorable or unfavorable. The per-
centage of those expressing unfavorable views of Functionalism
increases gradually as the respondents become younger. Five per-
cent of the group over fifty are unfavorable to Functionalism; nine
percent of those between 40-49 are unfavorable; eleven percent
of those between 30-39; and fourteen percent of those from 20-
29. There is no doubt that these differences are small and that
those unfavorable are clearly in the minority in any age group.
Nonetheless, the trend is very consistent and significant. It is clear
that the youngest respondents tend to be more hostile toward
Functionalism and, indeed, more than twice as much so as the
oldest.

If there is any sharp dividing line among them, it seems to Me
between those over and those under fifty years of age. The group
over fifty seems to be the most favorable (and the least un-
favorable) and, thereafter, as one goes down the age fine, the
percentage of favorable responses dechnes and the percentage of
unfavorable ones increases. The “breaking point” seems to be
between those who were professionally trained before or during
World War II and those who were trained after it. Moreover, there
is some indication, from examination of the more indeterminate
or “neutral” responses, that these manifest a small but steady
decUne, from the older to the younger groups. In short, the middle
ground seems to be disappearing, and there are signs of some
polarization. The growth of unfavorable responses derives both
from the decline of neutral or uncertain attitudes toward Function-
alism, and the decline in the proportion of those favorably oriented
toward Functionalism. But still the most relevant finding here is
that the young are defecting from Functionahsm or are more likely
to be repelled by it. Small though the differences are at this point,
this trend is so distinct that there is considerable reason to expect
that it will continue, and that Functionalism will have increasing
difficulty in winning the young to its standpoint. And surely, when
a theoretical viewpoint manifests a declining abiMty to attract the
young, there are solid grounds for asserting that crisis is impending
for it.

Since 1964, when our survey of American sociologists was
begun, and 1966, when I first reported on it at the national meet-
ings of the American Sociological Association in Miami, there have

378 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

been a number of other indications of a growing disaffection
among the young, toward Functionalism in • particular, but also
toward Academic Sociology in the United States more generally.
The sharpest public expression of this was, as I have previously
noted, at the Boston meetings of the American Sociological Associa-
tion in 1968. It took a variety of forms, among them the formation
of the “radical caucus,” organized largely around young militants
fresh from their demonstrations at Columbia and other universities.
Disaffection was indicated in its reply to the Secretary of the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, in its “walk-
out,” and in its resolutions at the business sessions of the
Association. The activities of the radical caucus were further in-
tensified and extended at the San Francisco meeting of the ASA
in 1969, and clearly evidences that the dissatisfaction of the
young is now moving from individual expressions of dissent to
organized forms of resistance against what are taken to be the
dominant views in sociology.

The declining attractiveness of Functionalism to the younger
sociologist was certainly earlier evidenced in the augmented pub-
lication of polemical criticism against the Functionalist model dur-
ing the ig5o’s and ig6o’s. These criticisms seem to have been
most particularly voiced by scholars still under fifty, by men such
as Ralf Dahrendorf, Peter Blau, David Lockwood, Dennis Wrong,
myself, and others. In some part, moreover, there is considerable
reason to believe that the criticisms of Functionalism made by C.
Wright Mills also struck a particularly responsive chord among the
young.

Among other signs of the impending crisis of Functionalism is the
emergence of radically different and comprehensive theoretical
models, whose formal stipulations, and underlying assumptions
and sentiments, differ importantly from the Parsonsian model in
particular, and from Functionalism in general. Among the most im-
portant of these new theoretical models is the social psychology
of Erving Goffman, surely the most brilliant of his group.

OTHER SYMPTOMS OF THE CRISIS: GOFFMAN’S
DRAMATURGY AND OTHER NEW THEORIES

Goffman’s is a social “dramaturgy” in which appearances and
not underlying essences are exalted. It is a dramaturgy in which
all appearances and all social claims are endowed with a kind of

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 379

equal reality, however disreputable, lowly, and deviant their origin
may be. In short, unlike Functionalism, it has no metaphysics of
hierarchy. In Goffman’s theory the conventional cultural hierarch-
ies are shattered: for example, professional psychiatrists are
manipulated by hospital inmates; doubt is cast upon the difference
between the cynical and the sincere; the behavior of children be-
comes a model for understanding adults; the behavior of criminals
becomes a standpoint for understanding respectable people; the
theater’s stage becomes a model for understanding life. Here there
is no higher and no lower.

Goffman’s avoidance or rejection of conventionalized hierarchi-
calizations has, however, important ambiguities to it. On the one
side, it has an implication of being against the existent hier-
archies and hence against those advantaged by it; it is, to this
extent, infused with a rebel vision critical of modern society. On
the other side, however, Goffman’s rejection of hierarchy often
expresses itself as an avoidance of social stratification and of the
importance of power differences, even for concerns that are central
to him; thus, it entails an accommodation to existent power ar-
rangements. Given this ambiguity, response to Goffman’s theories
is often made selectively, the viewer focusing on that side of the
ambiguity congenial to him, and thus some among the rebellious
young may see it as having a “radical” potential.

Goffman’s is a sociology of “co-presence,” of what happens when
people are in one another’s presence. It is a social theory that
dwells upon the episodic and sees life only as it is lived in a narrow
interpersonal circumference, ahistorical and noninstitutional, an
existence beyond history and society, and one which comes alive
only in the fluid, transient “encounter.” Unlike Parsons, who sees
society as a resilient, solid rubber ball that remains serviceable
despite the chunks torn from it, Goffman’s image of social life is
not of firm, well-bounded social structures, but rather of a loosely
stranded, criss-crossing, swaying catwalk along which men dart
precariously. In this view, people are acrobatic actors and games-
men who have, somehow, become disengaged from social struc-
tures and are growing detached even from culturally standardized
roles. They are seen less as products of the system, than as in-
dividuals “working the system” for the enhancement of self. Al-
though disengaged or partly alienated from the system, they are
not, however, rebels against it.

In Goffman’s social world, it is not the moral code (or “respect”)
but “tact” (or prudent sociability) that cements. Such social order
as exists for Goffman depends upon the small kindnesses that men
bestow upon one another; social systems are fragile little floating
islands whose coasts have daily to be shored up and renewed. In

380 The Coining Crisis of Western Sociology

Goffman’s view of the world (to borrow George Homan’s phrase),
men are coming back into the picture — tricky, harassed little
devils, but still men — and the sturdy social structures drift away
into the background. There is communicated a sense of the pre-
cariousness of the world and, at the same time, of zest in manag-
ing oneself in it.

Rather than conceiving of activities as a set of interlocking func-
tions, Goffman’s dramaturgical model advances a view in which
social life is systematically regarded as an elaborate form of drama
and in which — as in the theater — men are all striving to project
a convincing image of self to others. Here men are not viewed as
trying to do something but as trying to be something. (The “third
estate” is still trying to be “something”; now, however, it is taking
short cuts.) If life is a “countinghouse” for the Republican Boston-
ian of “comparatively wealthy family,” for whom the essential
relation is one of exchange, for Goffman it is a theater where all
are engaged in a perpetual play and all are actors. (Actually, how-
ever, Goffmn’s dramaturgy' is based upon a limited type of theater;
it takes its departure from what might be termed the “neo-classical”
drama, which is quite different from, say, the “guerrilla” theater or
the “living” theater, both of which commonly portray strong pas-
sions and are openly infused with moral purpose. )

Goffman thus declares a moratorium on the conventional dis-
tinction between make-believe and reality, or between the cynical
and the sincere. In this all-the-world’s-a-stage world, what is taken
to be real is not the work that men do or the social functions they
perform. Rather, human conduct is seen as essentially concerned
with fostering and maintaining a specific conception of self before
others. The outcome of this effort, moreover, is not seen as depend-
ing on what men "really” do in the world, on their social functions,
or on their worth, but on their ability skillfully to mobilize con-
vincing props, settings, fronts, or manner. A man’s value in this
world, then, depends upon his appearances and not, as it had to the
classical bourgeois, on his talents, abilities, or achievements.

While Goffman’s theory may be viewed as a kind of "micro-
functionalism,” concerned to identify the mechanisms that sustain
social interaction, he fails to ask the central questions that a func-
tionalist would pose, concerning the presentations of self that are
made. He does not explain, for example, why some selves rather
than others are selected and projected by persons, and why others
accept or reject the proffered self. That is, seeing this largely as a
matter of maintaining a consistent image of self, he does not ask
whether some selves are more gratifymg in their consequences, to
self and other, and whether this shapes their selection and accept-
ance. Nor does he systematically clarify the manner in which

Entropy o} Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 381

power and wealth provide resources that affect the capacity to
project a self successfully.

At the same time, however, Goffman’s dramaturgy is plainly not
an expression of aristocratic insouciance or of disdain for bourgeois
industriousness. Aristocrats believe in what they are and its worth;
Goffman’s actors are busy contrivers of the illusion of self. What
has happened, then, is not that we have left the world of the
bourgeois, but that we have entered deep into the changed world
of the new bourgeois. The dramaturgical model reflects the new
world, in which a stratum of the middle class no longer believes
that hard work is useful or that success depends upon diligent ap-
plication. In this new world there is a keen sense of the irrationality
of the relationship between individual achievement and the magni-
tude of reward, between actual contribution and social reputation.
It is the world of the high-priced Hollywood star and of the market
for stocks, whose prices bear little relation to their earnings.

Dramaturgy marks the transition from an older economy cen-
tered on production to a new one centered on mass marketing and
promotion, including the marketing of the self. It betrays the
change from a society whose heroes, as Leo LowenthaP has put it,
were Heroes of Production, to one where they are now Heroes of
Consumption. In this new "tertiary economy" with its proliferating
services, men are indeed increasingly producing “performances"
rather than things. Moreover, both the performances and products
they produce are often only marginally differentiated; they can be
individuated from one another only by their looks. In this new
economy, then, sheer appearance is especially important.

When men have no real choices, not only in the economic but
also in the political marketplace, appearances come to count most
heavily. Thus many Americans were drawn to President John F.
Kennedy because, as they held, he had “style." In an economy and
politics without significantly different alternatives, varieties of style
sustain the illusion of choice. Style becomes the strategy of inter-
personal legitimation for those who are disengaged from work and
for whom morality itself has become a prudent convenience. A
dramaturgical view of social life resonates the sentiments and
assumptions of the new middle class; of the "swinger" in the
service-producing sector of the economy, of the status-conscious
white-collar worker, professional, bureaucratic functionary, and of
the educated middle class, rather than of the propertied groups.

Goffman’s is a social theory appealing to men who live in or
must deal with large-scale bureaucracies that have a juggernaut
momentum of their own and are little amenable to the influence of
individuals. Thus Goffman does not deal with how men seek to
change the structure of these organizations or of other social sys-

382 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

terns, but, rather, with how they may adapt to and within them. It
is a theory of the “secondary adjustments” that men may make to
the overpowering social structures that they feel must be taken as
given. His theory of “total institutions” clearly communicates his
sense of the crushing impact of organizations on persons whose
individuality is viewed as protected largely by wiliness. In modem
and large-scale organizations, individuals become more readily
interchangeable, and their sense of worth and potency becomes im-
paired. Having little impact on the organization as a whole, they
focus on the management of impressions, seeking to be noticed
and differentiated from others, and attempting thereby to establish
their individual worth and potency. In a large-scale organization,
men are closely dependent upon the responses of others, and they
know that they are. Those who are more dependent, and more
sensitive to their dependence, will be more concerned to manage
the impression of self they communicate. The management of
impressions is a strategy of survival more likely to be emphasized
by persons whose assumptions remain individualistic and competi-
tive, but who are now dependent upon large-scale organizations.
Goffman is, in effect, depicting and defending the wily strategies
by which such persons protect themselves and seek to maintain
a sense of their own reality and potency under these conditions.

This newer middle class is not a social stratum that, cushioned
by independent means and appreciably “independent” of others,
can say: let the public be damned. The new bourgeois w'orld of
“impression management” is inhabited by anxious other-directed
men with sweaty palms, who live in constant fear of exposure by
others and of inadvertent self-betrayal. The management of im-
pressions becomes problematic only under certain conditions: when
men have to work at seeming to be what others expect them to be.
But why should men have to work at this, unless they are no longer
spontaneously disposed to do or be this? In short, the moral code
shaping social relationships has become less fully internalized in
them; while remaining a fact of social reality, it tends to become
a set of instrumentally manageable “rules of the game” rather than
deeply felt moral obligations.

Social relationships thus become an interaction of espionage
agents, each seeking to convince the other that he really is what he
claims to be, and each seeking to penetrate the other’s “cover.”
Under these conditions, “there is no interaction in which the par-
ticipants do hot take an appreciable chance of being slightly em-
barrassed or a slight chance of being deeply humiliated. Life may
not be much of a gamble, but interaction is.” 4 For all of its claim
to reality, then, the new dramaturgical world of appearances is a

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 383

thin crust on which men must tread lightly lest it cave in and
reveal — what?

Goffman’s dramaturgy is an obituary for the old bourgeois vir-
tues and a celebration of the new ones. This is its most fundamental
difference with Parsons’ theory, which remains rooted in the classi-
cal bourgeois virtues — in its belief in the importance both of utility
and of a genuinely held morality. Goffman’s sociolog)’ believes in
neither, at least not in anything like their former sense. For Goff-
man, what counts is not whether men are moral but whether they
seem moral to others; it is not morality as a deeply internalized
feeling of duty or obligation that holds things together, in Goff-
man’s view, but rather as conventional rules required to sustain
interaction and treated much as men do the rules of a game.

In their capacity as performers, individuals will be concerned with
maintaining the impression that they are living up to the many stand-
ards by which they and their products are judged. . . . But, qua per-
formers, individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing
these standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing
impression that these standards are being realized. Our activity, then,
is largely concerned with moral matters, but as performers we do not
have a moral concern in these moral matters. As performers we are
merchants of morality. 5

Moreover, it is not the utility of men or their activities — and,
indeed, not even the appearance of utility — that is held to matter.
What counts is whether the appearance is acceptable to or desired
by others (in short, whether one can sell it), and not whether the
appearance bears any relation to an underlying usefulness. We
might say that Functionalism was based upon a conception of men
and their activities as “use-values,” while dramaturgy is based upon
a conception of them solely as “exchange values.” (I Temember one
occasion after a long negotiating session with a publisher for whom
Goffman and I are both editors. I turned to Goffman and said with
some disgust, “These fellows are treating us like commodities.”
Goffman’s reply was, "That’s all right, Al, so long as they treat us as
expensive commodities.”) Dramaturgy reaches into and expresses
the nature of the self as pure commodity, utterly devoid of any
necessary use-value : it is the sociology of soul-selling.

Goffman’s dramaturgy is therefore anti-utilitarian only in the
sense of being opposed to a now historically declining form of
utilitarianism. While alienated from this old form, which held that
men could and should be useful in what they did, it relishes a new
marketing utilitarianism; it believes in the usefulness of sheer
appearances: the presentation and management of the self. Classi-
cal utilitarianism always insisted on the need to maintain a rela-

384 The Coining Crisis of Western Sociology

tionship between a man’s utility and his reward, between his indi-
vidual ability and his social mobility. Dramaturgy, however, is a
social theory in which this connection is totally severed. Bewitched
with consequences, classical utilitarianism always maintained that
it was “results that count,” and it thus always had a built-in dis-
position to an amoral calculus of pure efficiency — in short, to
anomic normlessness. Yet the inherent drift of classical utilitarian-
ism to anomie was partly inhibited by its theory of “natural rights”
and by its counterbalancing morality. Its venality was therefore
disguised by unctuousness and hypocrisy. The marketing utilitari-
anism on which dramaturgy is based lacks such moral scruples.
While it, too, believes that “it is results that count,” it interprets
this to mean that “anything goes.” Moving increasingly from an
inner- to an other-directed social world, dramaturgy capitalizes on
the natural culmination of utilitarianism in anomie. In other
words.- dramaturgy is not the antidote to utilitarianism but the
symptom of its pathology. Disdaining the inhibitions of the older,
somewhat “square” utilitarian culture, the dramaturgist is deter-
mined to outwit it at its own game. He is, at bottom, moved by an
impulse to get something for nothing, and therefore insinuates
that there is nothing to get and nothing to give: all is appearances.

Dramaturgy' thus premises a disenchantment with the older
utilitarian culture. It uses the new utilitarian culture as a stand-
point for an implicit critique of the old, and in this, enables men to
disengage themselves and maintain emotional or role distance from
it. Bennett Berger deftly lays this matter open in characterizing
Goff man’s as a “demonic detachment.” It is demonic — or Goff-
maniac, if you will — in that, while it denies a distinction between
appearances and reality, by insisting on taking appearances seri-
ously, it must also devalue, as just one more “appearance,” those
things that men have conventionally prized. Thus loyalty, sincerity,
gratitude, love, and friendship are seen as forms of maudlin senti-
mentality. Goffman’s is a demonic detachment, for the way of life
that it celebrates is a form of “camp”; even those who relish its
precious cleverness remain visitors to it. Goffman lays bare the
elaborate strategies by which men ingeniously contrive to persuade
others to buy a certain definition of the situation and to accept it
at face value. It is thus deeply ambivalent toward the status quo.
It is a clever unmasking of the clever and, at the same time, a how-
to-do-it manual of the modem utilitarianism of the new middle
class. It is an invitation to the enjoyment of appearances. Goffman
is to the sociology of fraud what Fanon is to die sociology of force
and violence.

To view the world as “drama” is to resonate the sentiments that
we normally direct at theatrical drama. Although the dramaturgical

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 385

model assures us that acting is very serious work, nonetheless, to
commend a view of life as a kind of play is still, for most of us, an
invitation to view it as an arena of limited and tentative commit-
ment. After the play or game is over, normality returns. “Normal-
ity” is an arena characterized by cumulating commitments, where
our previous efforts either fail or pay off, either limit or extend our
future opportunities. But a single drama does not encumber the next;
each opening night is a new beginning. Dramaturgy, then, is a
solution to the problem of how to charge life with renewable excite-
ment even when there is no real hope for a better future; it is a
way of getting “kicks” out of the present.

Insofar as this model embodies an ideology, rather than being
only a limited research heuristic (and the ideology is usually dis-
guised in the method), it must inevitably activate and trade on the
pathos with which we ordinarily regard dramas. Which is to say,
it refines our capacity to make commitments tentatively and
thereby to maintain our distance from things. It enables us, in
short, to keep our “cool.” The dramaturgical model allows us to
bear our defeats and losses, because it implies that they are not
"for real,” or at least allows us to define them as such after their
occurrence. In this respect the dramaturgical model itself is — to
use one of Goffman’s early formulations — a way of “cooling the
mark out,” of accommodating losers to failure. However, it may
also undermine the satisfaction of winning or of desirable out-
comes, because, by the same token, the dramaturgical model im-
plies that our victories too are not for real. Thus winning and losing
both become of lesser moment. It is only the game that counts.

Dramaturgical models are most convincing when adapted to only
partial social sectors or limited periods of time. When life is
looked upon as a drama, the focus must be given over to necessarily
restricted situations and personnel. The story can be told only
under the spotlight and while the curtain is raised; each drama is
an entity independent of the others.

In effect, then, the dramaturgical model invites us to five situa-
tionally; it invites us to carve a slice out of time, history, and society,
rather than to attempt to organize and make manageable the larger
whole. In this respect it is vastly different both from the more
traditional religious standpoints of Western society and, for that
matter, from the more classical evolutionary social philosophies
and the theories of total society that emerged in Western Europe
during the first half of the nineteenth century. Rather than offering
a world view, the new model offers us “a piece of the action.”

And yet it does this in a world that is becoming increasingly
interdependent. This would seem to imply that the drama to which
it invites us is a game to be played within the interstices of social

386 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

life and within the framework of the dominant institutions. A
dramaturgical model is an accommodation congenial only to those
who are willing to accept the basic allocations of existent master
institutions, for it is an invitation to a “side game.” It is for those
who have already made out in the big game, or for those who have
given up playing it. It has appeal to those members of the middle
class who generally mask their alienation out of a concern to
maintain a respectable appearance, and to those “dropouts” in the
Psychedelic Culture who feel no need to conceal their alienation;
both groups are alike in that they are not moved to protest against
and actively oppose the system that has alienated them.

GofFman’s dramaturgy is a revealing symptom of the latest
phase in the long-term tension between the middle class’s orienta-
tion to morality and its concern with utility. In its earliest develop-
ment, the middle class had denied the existence of such a tension,
or, if it perceived one, often vigorously came to the defense of
morality.

That the modern middle class had to travel a long way to reach
GofFman’s world of vaunted appearances could not be made plainer
than by contrasting it with Rousseau’s altogether different stand-
ard. The comparison is relevant because, like Goffman, Rousseau,
too, was obsessed with the world of appearances; but for Rousseau
appearance was the mask of insincerity, the barrier that isolated
men from one another, the glittering exterior that alienated him
from himself.' 1 Appearances, in short, were not vaunted but
damned. As Rousseau declaimed in 1750 in his Dijon essay,

What a happiness it would be to live amongst us, if our exterior
appearance were always the true representation of our hearts; if our
decency were virtue, if our maxims were the rules of our actions. . . .
Dress will set forth the man of fortune, and elegance the man of taste;
but the wholesome robust man is known by others ... all ornaments
are strangers to virtue . . . the honest man is a champion who wrestles
stark naked.; he disdains all those vile accoutrements which prove only
incumbrances. ... In these our days the art of pleasing is by subtile
researches, and finery of taste, reduced to certain principles; insomuch
that a vile deceitful uniformity runs thro’ our whole system of manners.
. . . Politeness constandy requires, civility commands; we always follow
customs, never our particular inclinations: no one nowadays dares to
appear what he really is. . . . Shall we then never rightly know the man
we converse with? . . . Friendships are insincere, esteem is not real,
and confidence is ill-founded; suspicions, jealousies, fears, coolnesses,
reserve, hatred, and treasons, are hid under the uniform of a perfidious
politeness.

This passionate demand for artless “sincerity,” and this moral out-
rage at the constraint that custom imposes on the baring of the

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of 'New Theories 387

heart, is rooted in the assumption that man is at bottom good and
he therefore need not fear self-exposure or the possibility that he
would be less than he should be if he trusted his own impulses. It
is rooted in the assumption that man need not betray himself: “I
have only to consult myself concerning what I ought to do; all that
I feel to be right, is right; whatever I feel to be wrong, is wrong . . .
conscience never deceives us.”

The transition from Rousseau’s to Goffman’s social world was a
long passage-, from men capable of moral indignation to “mer-
chants of morality”; from men of self-absorbed Calvinist conscience
to gamesmen adroitly making their moves, not in accord with in-
ward consultation, but in shrewd anticipation of the other’s counter-
move; from the outsider — to whom everything came so painfully
hard — to those who feel there is no outside and no inside, but only
different situations that yield to different strategies; from the criti-
cism of “insincerity” to the acceptance that all is insincerity; from
the desperate plea for the baring of the heart to the cool sneer at
sentimentality'.

Eighteenth-century “sentimentality” was the self-expressionism
of those who wanted to be and to be known as moral, who under-
stood morality as the capacity to feel, who feared that utilitarian-
ism was drying up something human and was isolating men. Con-
tempt for sentimentality, however, is a fear that feeling and love
expose one, that they bind us to others in ways that limit the
means we can employ, that they lock us into relationships and im-
pede our movement from game to game. Sentimentality is the
effort — by those who fear isolation — to overcome it, to find some
human connection, and to express a human solidarity. Contempt
for sentimentality is the hardening of the self to endure isolation
in order that one’s market options should not be preempted. Senti-
mentality was the counterfeit of feeling and of love; fear of
sentimentality is the counterfeit of objectivity.

For Rousseau, the conflict between utility and morality was as
fully evident as was its solution: “how often have we not been told
by the monitor within, that to pursue our own interest at the ex-
pense of others would be to do wrong!” But he insisted that the
conflict could be solved and that the way to do so was to yield to the
promptings of the conscience: “Reason deceives us but too often
. . . but conscience never deceives us. "Whoever puts himself under
the conduct of this guide, pursues the direct path of nature, and
need not fear to be misled.” Conscience, it was supposed, was
essentially harmonious.

In the Classical period of the sociological synthesis, however,
not only was the tension between morality and utility acknowledged
by Max Weber, but he held that their relationship entailed a di-

388 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

lemma that was not soluble in any generalized maimer. Weber
argued that there was an inexpungeable tension between two
kinds of ethics: an “ethic of absolute ends,” on the one side, in
which men opted for certain courses solely because they believed
in their moral propriety, and an "ethic of responsibility,” on the
other, in which courses of action were selected by weighing, in
more utilitarian fashion, their possible consequences. Weber was
leaving a place for utilitarianism, but only a very special version of
social utilitarianism in which courses of action were selected in
terms of their expected contribution to the nation-state. In short,
like many other academics of the Classical period, Weber was a
nationalist.

Weber believed in the validity of both a social utilitarianism and
an ethic of transcendental or absolute morality; nevertheless,
he acknowledged that each was somewhat inimical to the other
and that the single-minded pursuit of either one undermined the
other. He saw no way of resolving this dilemma in general, but
only on the level of individual choices made by inner-directed per-
sons aware of the peculiarities of each specific case. The individual
was expected to shoulder resolutely the difficulties in balancing the
two kinds of considerations.

From one standpoint, we might say that Weber was less hypo-
critically pious about morality and more “realistic,” having “hard-
ened” himself against Rousseauian “sentimentality.” Like Rousseau,
he believed that men should consult their consciences in choosing
their paths; unlike Rousseau, however, he stressed that the pursuit
of one value might undermine realization of another. Men need,
therefore, to steel themselves to violate some of their own values if
they are to achieve others: men must be "hard” in order to endure.
There was, in short, no promise of an essential harmony in the
world, but, rather, of an intrinsic disharmony: the world was seen
as demonic. For Goffman’s “merchants of morality.” however, this
dilemma simply does not exist; all conflicts may be remedied by
the manipulation of appearances.

Goffman’s dramaturgy is one more effort to resolve the tension
between utility and morality; it responds to this dilemma not by
doggedly holding on to both of its horns, but by releasing both.
Goffman, simply and deftly, sidesteps the issue, substituting the
standpoint of a sociological aesthetics for both morality and utility.
Despite this, however, his solution premises the continued exist-
ence of individualistic and social utilitarianism as well as of the
social strata on which they rest. Dramaturgy is, as it were, an
interior decoration that provides a new look to these older furnish-
ings.

The sociology of Erving Goffman is, in my view, a complexly

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 389

articulated theoretical expression that resonates the new experi-
ence of the educated middle class. This new experience has gen-
erated new conceptions of what is “real” in the social world, along
with a new structure of sentiments and domain assumptions that
are dissonant with the kind of utilitarianism once traditional to the
middle class. Most particularly, the middle class now lives in a
world in which conventional conceptions of utility and morality are
less and less viable; in which rewards often seem to bear little
relation to men’s (or things’) usefulness or morality; in which men
can get ahead without the conventional talents or skills necessary
in the old production-centered middle-class economy. In short, the
new middle class has become sensitized to the irrationalities of the
modem system of rewards. These irrationalities have at least three
distinct forms. First is an heightened market irrationality, in which
“stars” and other highly advertised and speculative commodities
reap enormous gains, soaring to great heights one day and some-
times collapsing the next. A second and increasingly pervasive
form of reward irrationality, which might be termed bureaucratic
irrationality, draws totally arbitrary lines between those who "pass"
and “fail” — and thus between those who are admitted or promoted
and those who are not — often doing so on the basis of the most
minuscule distinctions in performance. (Contemporary student re-
volts are, in some part, exacerbated by this form of bureaucratic
irrationality.)

These rather modern forms of reward irrationality exist along
with the most classical, bourgeois form; namely, the provision of
special rewards and opportunities on the basis of property rights
alongside of but without any regard for the allocative standards
either of the market or the bureaucracy. There is thus a growing
confluence of new and old irrationalities in the reward system now,
which together seriously attenuate its public legitimacy as well as
the authority of those who "succeed” and come to the top through
its operations.

Where the irrationality of the reward system grows pronounced,
where the relationship between what a man does and what he gets
develops considerable slippage, it may be expected that a continued
commitment to conventional middle-class modes of winning re-
wards — to morality and/or utility — will wane, and that new ideol-
ogies accounting for or accommodating to this slippage will grow
stronger. There will be a stress on good luck, on the importance of
power and personal connections, on ritualistically "playing the
system,” and (as in Goff man’s case) on the significance of sheer
appearances.

Goffman's sociology corresponds to the new exigencies of a-
middle class whose faith in both utility and morality has been

39° The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

gravely undermined. In this new period, traditional moralities and
religions continue to lose their hold on men’s faith. Once sacred
symbols, such as the flag, are mingled defiantly with the sensual
and become, as in some recent art forms, a draping for the “great
American nude.” “Pop art” declares an end to the distinction be-
tween fine art and advertising, in much the same manner that
dramaturgy obliterates the distinction between “real life” and the
theater. The “Mafia” become businessmen; the police are sometimes
difficult to distinguish from the rioters except by their uniforms;
heterosexuality and homosexuality come to be viewed by some as
akin to the difference between righthandedness and lefthanded-
ness; the television program becomes the definition of reality. The
antihero becomes the hero. Once established hierarchies of value
and worth are shaken, and the sacred and profane are now
mingled in grotesque juxtapositions. The new middle class seeks
to cope with the attenuation of its conventional standards of utility
and morality by retreating from both and by seeking to fix its per-
spective in aesthetic standards, in the appearances of things.

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY: SOCIOLOGY
AS A HAPPENING

Among other emerging theoretical standpoints based upon infra-
structures fundamentally at variance with the Parsonsian is that
advanced in Harold Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology. 7 Like Parsons,
Garfinkel is deeply interested in the requisites of social order. Un-
like Parsons, however, he assigns no special importance either to
the role of a mutuality of gratifications or to that of shared moral
values. Instead, and in a more Durkheimian manner, Garfinkel is
concerned with the' cultural level and, in particular, with a kind of
secularized “collective conscience.” Influenced by Alfred Schuetz’s
phenomenology, his attention is focused largely on the structure of
the shared and tacit — that is, ordinarily unutterable — rules and
knowledge that make stable social interaction possible. For Gar-
finkel, then, the social world is held together not by a morality
tinged with the sacred, but by a dense collective structure of tacit
understandings (what men know and know others know) concern-
ing the most mundane and “trivial” matters, understandings to
which no special importance, let alone sacred significance, is
normally attributed if, indeed, they are noticed at all. 8

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories ~cn

Like Goffman, Garfinkel focuses on everyday life and on routine
activities, rather than on critical events or dramatic public inci-
dents. He regards all people as being “practical theorists," collabo-
ratively creating meanings and understandings of one another's
activities. His methodology has a strongly monistic vector, there
being no radical difference between sociologists and other men. A:
the same time, however, Garfinkel criticizes all normal soclologv
for failing to understand this properly. In other words, while he
sees the continuity between professional and practical theorists, he
also wants professional social theorists to behave in a more self-
conscious manner than practical theorists, by becoming aware of
their own involvement in the common sense world. Seeing social
reality as created and sustained in the mundane activities of ordi-
nary men, Garfinkel seeks to understand social situations from the
“inside" as it were, as it appears to the men who live it; he seeks
to communicate their sense of things, with an almost Nietzschean
hostility to conceptualization and abstraction, and particularly bv
avoiding the conceptualizations conventional to normal sociologv.
Thus he erects few or none of the conceptual towers that both
Parsons and Goffman like to build.

Even though he stresses the significance of time as intrinsic to
meaning, Garfinkel’s. like Goffman’s, social world is a world outside
of time. He is ahistorical and does not limit his generalizations to
a given era or a specific culture. While deeply concerned with how
definitions of social reality become established, he is not interested
in why one definition of social reality becomes prevalent in one
time, or place, or group, and another elsewhere. The process by
which social reality becomes defined and established is not viewed
by Garfinkel as entailing a process of struggle among competing
groups’ definitions of reality: and the outcome, the common sense
conception of the world, is not seen as having been shaped by
institutionally protected power differences. There is a way in which
Garfinkel’s concern with the anchoring character of shared mean-
ings expresses a sense of a world not in conflict so much as in
dissolution, of a diffuse multiformity of values rather than a
clearlv structured conflict of political and ideological groups. He
seems to be responding to a social world in which sex, drugs,
religion, familv. school, all are uncertain, and in which the threat
is more of an entropic winding-down rather than of taut conflict.

In an old conceptual distinction. Garfinkel is the ethnographer
of the folkwavs rather than of the mores. Quite unlike Parsons.
Garfinkel apparentlv does not believe that social stability requires
that the rules or values be deeply internalized within persons or
their character structure. In fact, the tacit implication of his in-
genious and upsetting “experiments" is that men (most particularly

392 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

college students) may rather easily be made to act at variance with
them." In this, Garfinkcl seems to operate with much the same
assumption that GofTman docs: that is, both seem to premise a
social world resting on tacit understandings that, however im-
portant as a foundation for all else, are still fragile and rather
readily eluded. The cultural foundation, in short, is precarious, and
its security apparently rests, in some part, on its sheer invisibility
or taken-for-grantedness. Once made visible, however, it rather
readily loses its hold. Unlike Parsons. Garfinkcl communicates no
sense of the unshakable stability of social foundations.

The concrete differences in the specific character of these vary-
ing tacit rules is not examined by Garfinkcl. His attention, rather, is
largely focused, first, on demonstrating their sheer existence, and,
second, on demonstrating their role in providing a secure back-
ground for social interaction. As a result, there is a strong tendency
for each rule thus exposed to appear somewhat arbitrary, for each
is assigned no distinct function or differential importance and is, in
effect, interchangeable with a variety of others, all making some
contribution to a stabilizing framework for interaction. To perform
this stabilizing function, some oilier rule might conceivably do just
ns well. His emphasis, then, leads to a conception of these rules
ns conventions, and thus to a view of society as dependent on the
merely conventional — that is, on what are, in effect, rules of the
game. Garfinkcl normally e.\p>ses these rules through game-like
"demonstrations" of what happms when some men, without in-
forming others of their intent, deliberately proceed to violate these
tacit understandings. And alt parts of society, including science
(with its rigorous method), are seen to depend on these common
sense, arbitrary rules and procedures.

Unlike Coffman. Garfinkel takes no sensuous delight in the
world of appearances, Rather, he conceives of the truly important
part in the social world as practically invisible, as so familiar that
it is a world taken-for-granted and unnoticed. The task Garfinkcl
sets himself is to destroy this taken-for-grantedness and to strip
the cultural foundation of its cloak of invisibility. He is not en-
gaged in locating the familiar commonplaces within the framework
of some theory thereby to endow it with deeper meaning and en-
rich experience with it, which is one of the most deeply Romantic
of Coffman's tactics. Garfinkel aims, primarily, at baring and un-
masking the invisible commonplace by violating it in some manner
until it betrays its presence.

It would he a mistake, however, to conclude that Garfinkel is
engaged only in an archaeological excavation of hidden cultural
foundations, for his excavations proceed largely through the demo-

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of Neu: Theories 39-5

lition of small-scale worlds. If Goffman's work may be conceived
of as an attack upon certain forms of lower-middle-class smugness,
or morality, Garfmkel's is an attack upon the common sense of
reality. Thus students are instructed to engage friends or acquaint-
ances in ordinary conversation and, without indicating that any-
thing special is afoot, to pretend ignorance of everyday expres-
sions: “What do you mean, she had a ‘fiat tire’?" “What do you
mean, ‘how is she feeling’?" Undergraduates are assigned the task
of spending time with their families, all the while actin'; as if they
were boarders in their own homes. Again, students are" instructed
to engage someone in conversation and, while doing so. to assume
that the other person is trying to trick or mislead them; or they arc
instructed to talk with people while bringing their noses almost to
the touching point.

At first blush, these demonstrations seem to have a prankish
collegiate quality, but this view of them as “harmless fun” wears
thin as one reads the reactions of the “victims,” as Garfinkel some-
times correctly calls them 10 : “She became nervous and jittery, her
face and hand movements . . . uncontrolled."" “Quarreling, bicker-
ing, and hostile motivations become discomfitingly visible." 1 - There
w*as “irritation and exasperated anger ," 13 “nasty developments fre-
quently occurred.”" “I actually came to feel somewhat hated and
by the time I left the table I was quite angry.""* “Attempted avoid-
ance, bewilderment, acute embarrassment, furliveness, and above
all uncertainties of these as well as uncertainties of fear, hope, and
anger were characteristic.”

These, then, are the pained responses normal to persons whose
conceptions of social reality have been violated, and, indeed, quite
deliberately assaulted. It must be understood, however, that painful
though they are, these responses are not unanticipated but ex-
pected by Garfinkel. As he says in one connection, the responses
“should, be those of bewilderment, uncertainty, internal conflict,
psycho-sexual isolation, acute, and nameless anxiety along with
various symptoms of acute depersonalization.” ir *

The cry of pain, then, is Garfinkel’s triumphal moment; it is
dramatic confirmation of the existence of certain tacit rules gov-
erning social interaction and of their importance to the persons
involved. That he feels free to inflict these costs on others, on his
students, their families, friends, or passersby — and to encourage
others to do so — is not, I would suggest, evidence of a dispassionate
and detached attitude toward the social world, but of a readiness
to use it in cruel ways. Here, objectivity and sadism become deli-
cately intertwined. The demonstration is the message, and the mes-
sage seems to be that anomic normlessness is no longer merely

3g4 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

something that the sociologist studies in the social world, but is
now something that he inflicts upon it and is the basis of his
method of investigation.

There is nothing that is quite so reminiscent of Garfinkers dem-
onstrational methodology as the “happening,” which, however,
usually lacks the unblinking hurtfulness of Garfinkel’s techniques,
and may also have a larger social purpose. In the “happening,”
something like this occurs : shortly before noon, say, in Amsterdam,
a group of youths gathers in one of the busier squares and, just
as luncheon traffic begins to mount, they release into the streets
one hundred chickens. These, of course, distract and amaze the
drivers; accidents may happen; traffic halts; crowds gather, further
tying up traffic; routines come to a stop as everyone gathers around
to watch and laugh as the police attempt to catch the chickens.
Garfinkel might say that the community has now learned the im-
portance of one hitherto unnoticed rule at the basis of everyday
life: chickens must not be dropped in the streets in the midst of the
lunch hour rush.

Behind both the “happening” and the ethnomethodological dem-
onstration there is a common impulse: to bring routines to a halt,
to make the world and time stop. Both rest on a similar perception
of the conventional character of the underlying rules, on a view of
them as lacking in intrinsic value, as arbitrary albeit essential to
the conduct of routine. And both are forms of hostility to the “way
things are,” although the ethnomethodologist’s is a veiled hostility,
aimed at less dangerous targets. Both communicate at least one
lesson: the vulnerability of the everyday world to disruption by
violation of tacitly held assumptions. Underneath tire ethnomethod-
ological demonstration, then, there is a kind of anarchical impulse,
a genteel anarchism, at least when compared with the “happening.”
It is an anarchism that will, to some extent, appeal to youth and
others alienated from the status quo, and that may also congenially
resonate the sentiments of some on the New Left. It is a way in
which the alienated young may, with relative safety, defy the
established order and experience their own potency. The ethno-
methodological “demonstration” is, in effect, a kind of micro-
confrontation with and nonviolent resistance to the status quo. It
is a substitute and symbolic rebellion against a larger structure
which the youth cannot, and often does not wish to, change. It
substitutes the available rebellion for the inaccessible revolution.

In any event, it seems quite evident that, while nominally
centered on the analysis of social order, Garfinkel’s ethnomethod-
ology is infused with a structure of sentiments directly at variance
with the Parsonsian. The very frequency with which its often dense
and elephantine formulations are attractive to the young is indica-

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 395

tive of its congeniality to the new structure of sentiments held by
some of them, as well as of their readiness to seize upon almost
anything that promises an alternative to Parsonsianism. If Golf-
man’s social theory was a “cool" or "hip" sociology congenial to the
politically passive 1950’s. Garfinkel’s is a sociolog}- more congenial
to the activistic 1960's, and particularly to the more politically- re-
bellious campuses of the present period.

HOMANS: THE TOUGH-MINDED WORLD OF EXCHANGE

Still another set of theoretical models significantly different from
the Parsonsian is that which has been developed by George Homans
and Peter Blau in their theories of social exchange. One character-
istic that sets them well apart from the Functionalist model is the
insistence with which they spell out their economic assumptions
and place them at the center of analysis. Men are seen as exchang-
ing gratifications. Indeed, all forms of behavior come to be Mewed
as ha\ing certain market characteristics, as susceptible to varia-
tions in supply and demand, as subject to considerations of mar-
ginal utility. The effort is to get beneath morality, to discover an
abiding substructure upon which morality itself depends and on
which institutional survival rests. The aim is to probe underneath
culturally structured social roles for the more elemental units of
behavior. In Homans’ work, as in Goffman's, there is a backing
away from established institutions and culturally given roles; men
appear not only as members of a specific society- “but as members
of a species.” And also like Goff man, Homans noyv has an increas-
ing and neyv awareness of the precariousness of things.

Unlike the Functionalist, Homans places no special reliance upon
legitimacy and social norms to account for an institutioris stability-.
Rather, Homans sees these as themselves dependent upon the
gratifications that must come in forms men can enjoy not simply
because thev have been taught to do so, “but because they are men.”
Men as homo sapiens, embodied men, have come back into the
picture, and Homans tells social scientists to stop talking as if
society “were the big thing.” The secret of society, he says, "is that
it yvas made by men.”

For all his behavioristic psychology, then, Homans is at one yvith
Goff man and Garfinkel in assigning an active role to men as
builders and users of social structures and social orders, and not

396 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

simply as their receivers and transmitters. They are thus quite
different from the more mechanistic, later Parsons, though sympa-
thetic to the “voluntarism” that Parsons has long since abandoned.
Despite the differences in their theoretical antecedents — for Ho-
mans it was B. F. Skinner, for Goffman, G. H. Mead and Kenneth
Burke — and despite their very different conceptions of science and
scientific method, they have these important convergences.

The difference between Goffman’s and Homans’ most basic meta-
phors — theater and exchange — reflects, in some part, their sensi-
tivity to different layers in modern middle-class life. Goffman is
open to the new middle class, while Homans is open to the as-
sumptions and sentiments of its older, more solidly established,
propertied segments. Homans unabashedly insists on the impor-
tance of what men get from and give to one another, on their
mutual usefulness, as the central source of social solidarity. Goff-
man, however, says that it is illusions that count and, in the
tradition of Bamum and other great “merchandisers,” he holds that
one does not sell the frankfurter but the sizzle. Homans rejects
Parsonsian Functionalism, at least in part, from the standpoint of a
no-nonsense tough-mindedness that wishes to accept the reality of
social life without the illusions of morality. Goffman also is
tough-minded, but he denies that there is any hard core of under-
lying reality; he denies that either moral values or usefulness are
what hold society together, but sees this, instead, as resting on the
mutual acceptance of illusion.

What I have said above of Goffman’s, Garfinkel’s, and certainly
Homans’ work is, of course, sketchy and incomplete in the extreme.
My aim has not been to present a systematic discussion of their
theoretical views, but only to describe them sufficiently to indicate
the manner in which their domain assumptions and sentiments are
notably different from those embedded in the dominant Func-
tionalist model and thus to suggest how deep is the challenge they
now pose for it.

THEORY AND ITS INFRASTRUCTURE

To some degree, the elaboration of a social theory has a life of its
own; technical concerns provide it with a measure of autonomy.
At the same time, however, theory is embedded in and shaped by
a variety of other potent forces; the sentiments, the domain as-

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories - 397

sumptions, the conceptions of reality accented by personal experi-
ence, all these constitute its individual and social grounding. This
grounding or infrastructure links the theory, on the one side, to
the individual theorist and, on the other, to his larger society. For,
this infrastructure is “in” the theorist, but, at the same time, it
derives from his experience in society where it is shared by some
others.

Social theory, then, changes in at least two ways and for two
reasons. First, it changes through “internal,” technical development
and elaboration, in conformity with such distinctive rules of rele-
vance and decision-making as it may have. Second, social theory
may also change as a consequence of changes in the infrastructure
in which it is anchored: that is, as a consequence of changes in the
social and cultural structure as these are mediated by the changing
sentiments, -.domain assumptions, and personal reality of the
theorist and those around him. Any effort to deal with the extra-
technical sources of theoretical change, if it fails to locate the
theorist in society, can only produce a “psychology” of knowledge,
overstating the importance of the unique characteristic of the theorist
as a person; correspondingly, any such effort that does not relate the
theory to the person of the theorist can produce only an uncon-
vincing "sociologism” that fails to explain how the society comes to
affect social theory; in the end, it can discover only a “Hamlet with-
out Hamlet.” Our concern with the infrastructure of sentiments,
assumptions, and personal reality is an effort to avoid this Scylla
and Charybdis : to find a way of coming close to the human system,
the theorist who does theoretical work, and, at the same time, to
provide systematic connections with the other systems, the society
and. culture to which his work is related and by which it is
influenced.

Social theory then lives on two levels, its technical or formal
level, and its infrastructure. And it changes for reasons that involve
the relationship of the two levels in subtle and complex interplay.
Much of the stability and continuity of any social theory, or its insta-
bility and change, derive from the way these two levels interact.
In a general way, we can suggest that tensions always arise within
theories or, more exactly, in the course of men’s efforts to work
with and relate to them — when there develops some kind of dis-
parity, disjunction, malintegration, or "contradiction” between
these two levels.

For example, the technical elaborations of a social theory may
so outrun and overwhelm its original anchorages in some infra-
structure that the theory may come to be seen by some as “trivial”
or formalistic.” In other words, the technical development of a
social theory may lead it to lose contact or to conflict with the

398 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

personal reality, domain assumptions, or sentiments of some, who
then react by feeling that the theory is not “telling it like it is”;
they may find that the theory is “absurdly” unconvincing, or that
it inhibits certain feelings they already have, or that it activates
certain sentiments that are unpleasant. When a theory resting on
one infrastructure, one specific set of sentiments, domain assump-
tions, and personal reality — is encountered by those whose own
infrastructure is quite different, the theory is experienced as mani-
festly unconvincing. This may also occur when men’s infrastruc-
tures are changing, when people with new sentiments, assump-
tions, or personal reality are emerging and are encountering social
theories that embody older infrastructures.

The theory that we “see,” whether “housed” in lectures, articles,
books, or conversations, is always a product of technical concerns
and infrastructures in mutual interaction. The more that a theorist
defines his work as “complete” or “finished,” the more he presents
it in a public rather than private performance, and the more that
he communicates it to technically specialized audiences, then the
more will he tend to present it as if it were an “autonomous”
performance made in sole and exclusive conformity with the
special rules of theorizing, and the more will he omit and conceal
indications of its linkages to the extratechnical infrastructure. The
theory will, in short, be “dressed up” and made presentable; the in-
frastructure’s implication in the theory will be secreted — suppressed
or repressed — and hidden from the theorist’s audience and, indeed,
often from the theorist himself.

In any event, a major source of change in social theory, and
particularly of shifts in the fundamental paradigms of a theoretical
community, is when the technical directives of social theory have
become dissonant with the dispositions arising from the infrastruc-
ture. Such a dissonance eventuates in apathy toward or criticism
of the existent theory; it generates pressure to change. If the dis-
sonance between these two levels is sharp enough, the resultant
pressure can be thought of as precipitating a theoretical crisis. It
is, in large measure, because I believe that this is what is presently
happening, and, most particularly, that changes in the social and
cultural structure have produced among the younger generation
new infrastructures which are dissonant with Functional theory,
that I foresee a crisis intensifying and deepening in the near future.
The most important indication of the new, theoretically consequen-
tial infrastructure of the younger generation is, I believe, the
emergence of the New Left.

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories

399

NEW LEFT AND NEW INFRASTRUCTURE

The “New Left” or die “New Radicalism” is a world-wide phe-
nomenon. It is a social movement of loose and sprawling bounda-
ries encompassing a very heterogeneous variety of political dis-
positions whose coherence rests, at this point, primarily on the
new infrastructures — rather than on political programs or articu-
lated ideologies — of the younger generation. In the United States
it is closely linked to the rising civil rights movement for “Black
Liberation” and has roots both in the agricultural communities of
the South and in die ghettoes of the city. North and South. Among
Blacks, in pardcular, this struggle is oriented to “stomach ques-
tions" as well as to related issues of civil liberties. This movement
has developed with a rapidity that has confounded and antiquated
those trained in the older theoretical and political traditions. Within
the space of hardly a decade it has moved from the call for
"Freedom Now” to the demand for “Black Power.”

The civil rights struggle has been a training ground, inspiration,
and stimulus to the New Left, composed of articulate, increasingly
radicalized college students, and, perhaps, particularly those who
have been herded together in the mammoth, bureaucratized public
universities. The “stomach questions” are not central for them,
although they do lend support to the struggle of the welfare poor
and Blacks against such deprivation. Crucial to the consolidation
of the new student radicalism in the United States is the increasing
opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Far from being "materialists," these students are often deliber-
ately “utopian" and activistically idealistic. The value emphases of
the new student radicals center on equality and freedom, but they
do not stop there. They also include disgust at affluence without
dignity; desire for beauty as well as democracy; belief in creativity
rather than consensus; wish for community and communal values,
and vehement rejection of depersonalized bureaucracy; desire to
build a “counter society" with “parallel institutions” and not simply
to be integrated into and be accepted by the dominant institutions;
hostility to what is conceived of as the dehumanization and aliena-
tion of a cash-nexus society; preference for individuated, intensely
felt, and self-generated interpersonal style, including fuller sexual
expression and experimentation. They want what they think of as
warm human relations and a kind of “inventive sensuality,” rather

400 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

than the rational discipline of either the independent professions
or the bureaucratic establishments.

Radical as it is, the New Left does not engage in hero-worship of
Marx. It often critically distinguishes the younger Marx of “aliena-
tion,” whom it prefers to the older anti-utopian Marx, and it
frequently rejects the Realpolitik of historical Marxism. Far from
uniformly relying on the working class for support, the student
radicals sometimes fear that it can be bought off — as some of them
also believe the Black ghettoes will be — by the affluent Welfare
State. If they want a working-class alliance, they also seek allies
among the members of the different- cultural ghettoes, among
whom they include: college students; the alienated rich, wh'om they
are often prepared to treat instrumentally; the inhabitants of the
welfare and Black ghettoes, even though some may doubt their
long-range commitment to basic social change; and members of
different types of deviant groups. New Left youth are often hopeful
about the role of artists, believing them to be a group whose work
embodies a sharp critique of conventional values as well as mani-
festing a new vision of alternative values. Implicit in their interest
in the artist, and in aesthetics more generally, is their conviction
that what is now required by American society is a great deal more
than an economic or material change: rather, it is a change in
the total culture.

This radicalism seems to be a genuinely new social movement,
in the United States as elsewhere, having jettisoned some of the
most basic ground rules of the older liberal-left politics; it promises
to be of abiding significance. Aside from the fact that it is, on
one of its sides, firmly rooted in the massive needs of the Black
population, and thus in problems that are not momentary, we must
also remember that its university-based contingent is of growing
importance. This is so, if for no other reason than that there are
now more than 7,000,000 college students in the United States.
There are more college students than farmers.

The New Left, the growing radicalization of the student in the
United States, promises to be of particular importance for the
future of Functionalism and Academic Sociolog)'. This is because
the group’s domain assumptions, its structure of sentiments, and
its personal reality are deeply at variance with those embedded in
Functional theory. The New Left in the United States speaks, in a
deliberately utopian voice, of Freedom Now, while Functionalism
has never centered its interest on freedom or on equality, but has
rather, invested itself in order and social equilibrium. The New
Left is willing to support all manner of effort to achieve its values,
and, even where it advocates "nonviolence,” it is clear that social
change is more important to it than is social order. It is not

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 401

obsessed with order and is quite ready to risk disorder if it feels
this to be justified by the high values to which it is committed.
Indeed, going to jail on behalf of a good cause has become a mark
of pride and prestige among the youth of the New Left.

Far from advocating moral consensus, which is so crucial in
Functionalism, sections of the New Left want "parallel institutions”
or a total "counter society”; their appetite is for the sharpest criti-
cism rather than for consensus and continuity. Indeed, their move-
ment has broadened from a limited opposition against conventional
domestic politics to a resistance against official foreign policy and,
in particular, its imperialistic expressions. Thus, far from being
imbued with the mystique of authority and the metaphysics of
hierarchy, many of them are utopian democrats and dissensualist
rebels against constituted authority. Their ingrained anti-authori-
tarianism is also manifested in their preference for leadership and
organizational forms that minimize the role of formal authority:
they will brook no talk about the "functional indispensability of
stratification.” And far from supposing, as Functionalists often do,
that the great cementing sentiment in society is "respect,” what
they often seek in human relations is "warmth,” spontaneity, and
sensuality in its broadest sense. Unlike Functionalists who stress
that social system stability depends upon conformity with self-
restraining and self-denying moral values, the new radicals speak
in the name of gratification, and against all poverty, material and
emotional. For these and other reasons, it is clear that there is the
sharpest difference between the domain assumptions and senti-
ments underlying Functionalism and those of the New Left.

While this New Left is still far too young to have produced its
own social theory, it is plain that its new structure of sentiments
and domain assumptions are already leading it to exert the sharpest
pressure upon Functionalist professors and Functional theory. Its
admiration for the young Marx is only incidentally an index of
commitment to a specific brand of theory. Interest in the young
Marx is, most fundamentally, a way of expressing the desire to
be radical; it constitutes a search for a symbol and a theory that
may correspond with the new structure of sentiments. The shift to
the young Marx is thus expressive of the emergence of a new
structure of sentiments among the young; a structure of sentiments
deeply incompatible with that found in Functionalism and one
which will, I am convinced, in time produce the audience for and
the creators of significantly new social theories, even as it is already
undermining the appeal of Functionalism.

The New Left is at the very center of the changing academic
atmosphere. In this changing college atmosphere with its mani-
festly changing structure of sentiments, the old rhetorical strategies

402 The Coining Crisis of Western Sociology

of Functionalism lose their appeal and persuasiveness. The younp
new radical is not persuaded that Functionalism is not conserva-
tive by a rhetoric that seeks to show the convergences of Func-
tional theory with Marxism. For many of the new radicals, unlike
the student generation of the late i94o’s and 1950’s, to whom
Robert Merton first made that appeal, have little sentimental
attachment to Marxism; indeed, some not only regard it as devoid
of radical sensibilities but as downright “square.”

It is not simply, however, that the old distinctions between the
political right and left are increasingly experienced as irrelevant,
and it is not simply that orthodox Marxism itself is sometimes
alien to the new structure of sentiments that has arisen among the
new radicals. It is that, to some young radicals Marxism and
Functionalism may, indeed, seem more alike than different — just
as Merton claimed — but it is precisely because they see them as
similar and as offering little to choose between, that they will
reject Functionalism no less than vulgar Marxism, and thus
compound the crisis of Functionalism.

SOCIAL THEORY AND THE UNIVERSITY

The importance of these young people of the New Left and their
various sympathizers is not only in their numbers but in their
social location. What makes them of special significance for Func-
tional theory, in particular, and social theory, in general, is that
they are often college students. The appreciable extent to which
students exert intellectual pressure upon teachers is something
that academic establishments have for long managed to keep a
“dark secret.” The decisive consideration, here, is that because
so many in the New Left are students, they are directly involved
in the very academic establishments in which social theory today
is made and taught, daily reproduced and informally tested. Stu-
dents are an integral part of the very social system that transmits
and produces social theory. It is inevitable, therefore, that they will
exert considerable pressure on any social theory, whether estab-
lished or newly developing, in American universities today. Any
systematic social theory about social theory must, at some point,
explore the manner in which the “academic” context and the
student-teacher, or disciple-master, relationships in it affect the
course of theory-work and influence theory-products.

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 403

Since the Classical or third period in the development of Aca-
demic Sociology, the production of social theory has been almost
entirely the monopoly of academicians working in university
milieux; consequently, almost any major change in the organiza-
tion of the university or its personnel is a potential source of change
in social theory. Paradoxically, however, even though most social
theorists today are academicians, they have given little systematic
analysis to the role of the university in shaping social theory. The
tacit assumption seems to be that the university shapes social
theory — insofar as it does so at all — primarily by housing theorists,
by allowing them to get on with their individual efforts, and by
providing them with a vague collegial stimulation and with re-
search facilities that enable them to “test” theory, once it is
formulated. Above all, theory-making is commonly regarded as a
totally faculty - centered activity, one that can be understood en-
tirely apart from the faculty’s relationships with the students.

It is tacitly assumed that changes in a faculty’s relationship
with students or changes in the orientations and interests of stu-
dents themselves may be safely ignored in accounting for the
career of a theory. The student is largely seen as the passive
recipient (or audience) for a theoretical product or performance,
but his reaction to specific social theories is, presumably, not
consequential for their content, focus, character, or development.
The assumption seems to be that whether or not a student finds
a theory interesting or boring, relevant or irrelevant, will have no
consequences in his behavior toward those who present it to him;
or that such responses do not affect the faculty member toward
whom they are directed; or that, if they do affect him, it is only in
his capacity as an educator but not as a working theorist.

Even when theory is located in the context of faculty-student
relationships, this is usually seen as a one-way influence. The
faculty is seen as “transmitting” or “teaching” the theory to the
student, but no reciprocal influence by the student is expected to be
of consequence for the theory. Yet from the standpoint of the most
elementary precepts of sociological analysis, which do, indeed,
insist on the importance of a measure of mutuality and reciprocity
as intrinsic to the nature of any social relationship, such a one-way
image of faculty “transmission” to passive, recipient students must
be regarded as marvelously wrong-headed — particularly when held
by sociologists. One must insist, rather, that sociologists are like
other men; their work performances and products are shaped in
essentially the same manner as are other men’s, and social relation-
ships in which they are involved are essentially like those that
others experience. In short, there are serious theoretical grounds
for holding that even the work of social theorists may be influenced,

404 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociolog)'

and even by their students. It is, very largely, because of this that I
have stressed the importance of the emerging changes among
students, and, in particular, their growing radicalization, in
appraising the prospects of development in social theory.

THEORY, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND NEW
GENERATIONS

To sum up briefly thus far: every social theory rests on some in-
frastructure of tacit domain assumptions, on some set of senti-
ments, and on some set of experiences, which define what people
take to be real: that is, their personal reality. Every social theory
has certain implications and consequences for the infrastructure,
which is, on the one side, embedded in the theorist and his audi-
ences and, on the other, affected by the larger cultural and social
surround. This infrastructure of domain assumptions, sentiments,
and the sense of what is real mediates between social theories and
other parts of the social world. Every social theory resonates con-
genially or discomforts some sentiments more than others, but
certainly not all equally. Every social theory has implications about
what is real in the world, and thus has implications about what is
both desirable and possible in the social world. Every social theory
“fits” certain infrastructures and is dissonant with others.

Tension-generating dissonances that affect social theories may
thus arise in two fundamental ways. For one, the theories may be
elaborated and developed in formal or technical ways, and this
may make them lose contact or come into tension with their once
supportive infrastructure. For another, the infrastructure itself may
change radically in consequence of changes in the larger society,
with the possible result — even without any new discontinuing
evidence at all — that the established theory begins to seem irrele-
vant, absurd, disinteresting, or manifestly false, to those within
whom the new infrastructure has most fully and sharply developed.

The emergence of such a theoretically-consequential new in-
frastructure is most important when it is strong enough to sustain
and express itself despite the disapproval and resistance of those
bearing the traditional infrastructures. New infrastructures that
affect theoretical development tend to be collectively expressed,
therefore, in the experiences and lives of numbers of people, rather
than in only a few isolated individuals; in particular, they are often

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 405

borne by a cohort of age peers, a new generation. A new generation
is, at times, raised in a new and yet common way, under new but
common conditions, and confronting new problems in common.
While new and old generations may then confront the “same”
political or social issue, for example, a war, a revolution, a de-
pression, this is not the same experience or “reality” for them; for
the old generation, of course, interprets it in the light of their own
longer and previous experiences. It is, in consequence, a different
experience for them than it is for the younger generation, and
all the more so as the younger also assumes the older generation to
have been responsible for its management or mismangement.

Moreover, by reason of their shared experiences, members of
the younger generation develop solidarities that support and vali-
date the new infrastructure and that provide informal contexts in
which it may be given open and easy expression, even before they
have developed a new "language” that can articulate their new
assumptions, sentiments, and experiences. A new generation, then,
can often provide group support for emergent infrastructures that
make established social theories seem obsolescent. It can often
mount an active attack upon established theories, providing lever-
age that facilitates mass disengagement from old theories and, at
the same time, by providing mutual encouragement for the develop-
ment of new theoretical alternatives. This is, in large measure, the
significance of the current development of the New Left, whose
members clearly manifest a new infrastructure and who also have
clearly developed a protective sense of generational solidarity.

SOCIOLOGY AND THE NEW LEFT

The New Left, to repeat, is no one, single ideological or political
outlook. It is a very loose network of different, vaguely defined
reactions to a social situation in which there has been a continual
deterioration of conventional conceptions for both morality and
utility, attended by a growing sense of institutional hypocrisy. The
New Left characteristically denounces both the moral hypocrisy of
the older generation and, as well, the “irrelevance” of its own
education. Some sections of the New Left are presently pursuing
a search for a new sociology appropriate to the new social reality
they experience, largely by attempting to refocus Marxism in the
young Marx of alienation, the most anti-utilitarian phase of Marx’s

406 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

work. Whatever form it finally assumes, it seems likely that the
sociology of the New Left will be influenced by the new character
of the utilitarian culture in which it now finds itself. Utilitarianism
will remain one base for the transition to a new radical sociology,
while morality will be the other. Just as classical Marxism was
complexly influenced by the older utilitarianism, it seems almost
certain that a new radical sociology will, mutatis mutandis, be
influenced by the new utilitarianism.

Despite Marx’s biting theoretical critique of Benthamite utili-
tarianism, Marxism also embodied an underlying structure of
sentiments partly congenial to the culture of utilitarianism. On the
level of their structures of sentiments, the traditional bourgeoisie
and traditional Marxist may therefore feel closer to one another
than to the new radical. Indeed, there is a middle-aged counter-
part to the “trust no one over thirty” generational solidarity of the
New Left, which sees all other political ideologies as united in
opposition to the New Left. Thus in a hostile review of Daniel and
Gabriel Cohn-Bendit’s Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alter-
native, one reviewer remarks that it “will appeal only to the pro-
foundly disoriented and totally alienated. . . . For the rest of us,
conservative, liberal, socialist, and even communist, it can serve
only as a warning.” 17

Marxism never really doubted the importance of being useful,
although it insisted that this be a usefulness for humanity. Its
fundamental objection to capitalist society was to the dominating
significance of exchange-value, not to use-value. It objected to the
transformation of men’s labor into a commodity, but it continued
to emphasize the value and importance of work. Marx’s critique of
utilitarianism was arrested by his simultaneous critique of the
bourgeois morality of natural rights, as well as by his polemic
against utopian socialism for having mistakenly relied upon
morality as a lever for social change. The latter polemic, which
viewed morality as supers tructural, came to overshadow the critique
of utilitarianism and finally to edge it into a subsidiary place, par-
ticularly as historical Marxism came to define itself as a “scientific
socialism.”

In some part, Marx’s critiques of morality and utility were
polemics against sham and hypocrisy, against a society that
claimed to produce useful things and against men who claimed
to be respectable, but both of whom would produce anything —
useful or not — to turn a profit. Marx looked to history as a sub-
stitute for morality and utility. For men would do what they were
constrained to do by their social position in a given society at a
certain stage in the development of its contradictions. Historical

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories 407

necessity was thus regarded as resolving the contradiction between
morality and reality. Marxism saw men as agents of history and
sometimes came to believe that they might be used to further it.

The modem radical, however, is faced with a different situation.
He has encountered not only the venal hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie,
but also the Realpolitik of its enemy, historical Marxism. As part
of the post-Stalinist generation, the young radical clearly recognizes
that no one has clean hands. He lives in an historical period in
which the viable alternative to the market, namely, the bureau-
cratic organization, is seen to possess its own distinctive irrational-
ities; thus it is not only (as it was to an earlier generation of
radicals) the sheer venality of the system, not the doing of terrible
things to acquire money and property, which disgusts him. He
also sees that men will do awful things for the collective welfare
no less than for individual gain; for God, country, history, and
socialism. And now, moreover, living in an increasingly automated
society, the young radical observes that it is not merely labor but
self as well that is bought and sold. One of the distinctive re-
sponses that he therefore makes is his great insistence on the
importance of an ethic of absolute ends; his rejection of the
present is formulated in terms of moral outrage and disgust.

It is thus not at all the sheer difficulty of “getting ahead” that
underpins the new radicalism. Nor is it the lack of means adequate
to the achievement of individual success. This was a source of
much of the radicalism of the depressed 1930’s, but it is not central
to the experience of the affluent 1960’s. Much of the new radicalism
today is a response to the meaninglessness of success rather than
to the lack of it. Success is often experienced as meaningless be-
cause many who have been visibly successful are judged not to
deserve it, by virtue either of their moral qualities or of their
talents and utility to society. Success is not viewed as proving any-
thing about the worthiness, and hence the legitimacy, of the
successful.

The process through which success is achieved is viewed in-
creasingly as a "game,” and, indeed, this is one of the social sources
of the increasing popularity of game models in the social sciences.
For, in such games winning is understood to be partly a matter of
luck and pardy a matter of a limited cleverness in adapting to
those “rules of the game” whose only justification is that they allow
one to get on with it; lacking any intrinsic or higher legitimacy,
the rules are not deeply internalized. In “games” certain means of
playing are “ruled out,” but not because they are felt to be either
immoral or ineffective. 18 Neither sheer utility nor morality governs
the rules by which ends are pursued in games. A “good” game is

408 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

not necessarily one in which the player wins, or wins anything of
value. As Goffman indicates, the point of a game is absorption in
its ongoing process.

As the modem radical views it, the trouble with the social order
is not that it fails to pay off, but that it pays off in a worthless
currency. Modem radicalism of the New Left variety expresses
the experience of those who are already included in the system but
who want “out,” rather than of those who, marginal or excluded,
want “in.” Modern radicalism, therefore, is based upon a personal
reality and a corresponding structure of sentiments in which moral
rather than stomach issues are the central concern. Modern student
radicalism is the radicalism of affluence: it is the radicalism of
those whose hopes have been destroyed rather than of those whose
bodies have been stunted or whose ambitions have been thwarted.
(In the United States this has become a major source of divergence
between the New Left and the movement for Black Liberation.)
For the middle-class student radical, the affluence and temperate
moderation of the system are not experienced as compensations for
what is felt to be the system’s most inexcusable failure — its aim-
lessness.

The modern radical is faced with an utilitarian culture that exists
on various interlocking and contradictory levels. He may feel
opposed to all of them, but he has also been exposed to all of
them, and, indeed, he is sometimes critical of one level only from
the standpoint of the other levels he has partially assimilated. Its
three distinguishable levels are: individualistic, social, and market-
ing utilitarianism. Each emerged during different periods in the
history of the middle class, but all three continue to exist into the
present, superimposed on one another like overlapping shingles.
Individualistic utilitarianism was largely the product of the early,
family-centered entrepreneur, and was predominantly economic
and individualistic in its focus. Social utilitarianism took hold
among the middle class during the period of the growth of large-
scale, bureaucratic, industrial organization and was consolidated
during the emergence of the Welfare State. Marketing utilitarian-
ism, the most modern form, arises among the new middle class in
a tertiary economy where the relation between utility and reward
is increasingly irrational and has an arbitrary, game-like character.

In some part, the New Left both adopts and rejects all three
utilitarian standpoints. Some young radicals regard social utili-
tarianism from the standpoint of the older, and more individu-
alistic, utilitarianism and see it, for example, as producing a
deplorable dependence of deprived strata on the Welfare State.
Nevertheless, they may also believe it deeply wrong to allow such

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of Nets Theories 4°9

deprivation to go unremedied and feel that society has a collective
responsibility to help. One distinctive element in the standpoint of
the modem radical, however, is his new distrust of the bureaucratic
expressions of social utilitarianism and, correspondingly, the re-
newed vigor of his individualism. Indeed, the politics of some in
the New Left may be closer in its audacity to the “public be
damned" individualism of the Robber Barons than to the unctuous
social utilitarianism of old line social workers.

Many among the New Left also view marketing utilitarianism
with deep contempt; they counterpose to its other-directed concern
for appearances an insistence that each man “do his own thing,"
regardless of what others think or of how it looks. At the same
time, however, there do seem to be some tendencies in the New
Left that bring it close to the dramaturgical perspectives of a
marketing utilitarianism concerned with sheer appearance. It
occasionally seems that some regard the “revolt” against the estab-
lishment as a “happening" that is gratifying in and of itself, and
quite apart from its demonstrable effectiveness in transforming
the status quo. Yet the New Left also welcomes such revolts be-
cause it believes they unmask and strip the status quo of its pro-
tective appearances and reveal its hidden, deeper reality.

Many among the New Left of today have little sympathy left
for an “ethic of responsibility”; in short, they reject a prudent con-
cern for consequences. Not a few among the New Left have a
similar disdain for keeping up “appearances.” The New Left is
tired of computing consequences and is tired of people who, it
feels, have long done this without any substantial return for the
moral costs they have paid. Its dominant drift will, I suspect, be
toward an anti-utilitarian sociology; hence its already obvious
attraction to the “critical sociology” of the Frankfurt School. Yet
there are those in its own ranks who are quick to indicate that
planless rebellion converges at some point with dramaturgy, and
that the revolution as theatrical "happening" is not enough. In
short, there are those who will look to tomorrow in a more utilitarian
vein; they want to know what was won by today’s sacrifices.

In the end, I suspect, the future sociology of the New Left will
seek both an economically sensitive neo-Marxism, which has an
“opening" toward the practicality of utilitarianism, and a morally
sensitive or critical sociology, open to a critique of the system from
some external standpoint. To the extent that both dimensions can
be brought together in some mixture that enables them to keep
their contradictions in suspension, then such a new’ radical soci-
ology may be able to avoid some of the pitfalls of a Marxism that
embodies both moral and utilitarian sentiments, without fully

4io The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

acknowledging either, as well as of an Academic Sociology that
rejects both political and moral responsibilities, while continuing
to produce political and moral con sequences.

RESUME

The coming crisis of Western Sociology, then, and particularly its
expression in Academic Sociology, is manifested: (i) by the drift
of the dominant Functionalist and Parsonsian models toward a
convergence with Marxism, which is to say, toward what was
previously one of its main polemical targets; (2) by the emerging
alienation of young sociologists from Functionalism; (3) by the
tendency of such individual expressions of alienation to develop
collective and organized forms; (4) by the growing technical
criticism of Functional theory; (5) by the transition from such
negative criticism to the development of positive and alternative
theories, embodying importantly different sentiments and assump-
tions, such as Goffman’s, Garfinkel’s, and Homans’; and (6) by the
development of a middle-range “social problems” research and
theory that are often oriented to values of “freedom” and “equality”
rather than of “order,” as Functionalism tends to be.

Three forces contributing to this crisis have been considered:
( 1 ) the appearance of new infrastructures, dissonant with estab-
lished Functional theory, among the middle-class youth who have
a strategic closeness to the university milieux in which social theory
is made and transmitted; (2) developments internal to the Func-
tionalist school itself, which have entailed a growing variability
and inviduation in its w r ork — an entropy — and thus have obscured
the clarity and firmness of its theoretical boundaries and muddied
its distinctness as a special school; (3) the development of the
Welfare State, which has rapidly and greatly increased the re-
sources available to sociology. Functionalists have been disposed
to accommodate to the Welfare State; but, at the same time, this
has been done only by generating tensions for assumptions that
have traditionally been central to the Functionalist model.

Entropy of Functionalism — Rise of New Theories

411

NOTES

1. K_ Davis, “The Myths of Functional Analysis in Sociology and Anthro-
pology,” American Sociological Review, XXIV ( 1 959) » 757-773-

2. The gr oov ing variability in the interests and work styles of this seed
group cannot be underestimate^.. Robert Merton’s publication of On the
Shoulders of Giants is only one noteworthy example; it is important not only
as an indication of bis own personal interests and unique style, but also as a
particularly dramatic symptom of the growing individuation of styles in his
peer group as a whole. In short, it has a sociological as well as a personal
significance. This unusual book is noteworthy because of Mr. Merton’s
national eminence as an “elder statesman” of Functionalism and thus be-
cause of its variability-legitimating significance.

3. L. Lowenthal, “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” Radio Research
1942— 1943, P. E. Lazarsfeld and F. Stanton, eds. (New York: Duell, Sloan &
Pearce, 1944).

4. Erring Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh:
University of Edinburgh, 1936), p. 156.

5. Ibid., p. 162.

6. For a discussion of the implication of F.ousseau’s work for the theory
of alienation, see Iring Fetscher, Rcrusseau's Politische Philosophic (Neuwied:
Hermann Luchterhand, i960).

7. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethr.orr.ethodology (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1967). Garfinkel is at pains to express his indebtedness
to Parsons: for example, "The terms, ‘collectivity’ and ’collectivity member-
ship’ are intended in strict accord with Talcott Parsons’ usage in the Social
System . . . and in the general introduction to Theories of Society .” (P. 57.
Cf. also p. 76, Footnote 1.)

8. In consequence of his interest in this, Garfinkel explains that “the
et cetera clause, its properties, and the consequences of its use have been
prevailing topics of study and discussion among the members of the Con-
ferences on Ethnomethodology that have been in progress at the University
of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Colorado since February
1962, with aid of a grant from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research
. . . extended studies will be found in unpublished papers by Bittner, Gar-
finkel, MacAndrews, Rose, and Sacks; in transcribed talks given by Bittner,
Garfinkel, and Sacks . . . and in Conference transcriptions.” ( Ibid ., p. 73.)

g. Thus, in probing the no-bargaining, one-price rule, Garfinkel indicates
that “because of its ‘internalized’ character the student-customers should
have been fearful and shamed by the prospective assignment (that is, to
bargain over “one-price” goods), and shamed by having done it,” hut, by and
large, he claims this was not the outcome. Many students, savs Garfinkel,
simply learned that you can, indeed, bargain. (Ibid., p. 69.)

10. Ibid., p. 44.

11. Ibid., p. 43.

12. Ibid., p. 46.

13. Ibid., p. 48.

14. Ibid., p. 49.

15. Ibid., p. 52.

16. Ibid., p. 55. (Italics mine.)

17. Times Literary Supplement (London), November 28, 19SS, p. 1328.

18. Cf. B. Suits, “Life, Perhaps, Is a Game,” Ethics, 1967.

CHAPTER

From Plato to Parsons:
The Infrastructure of
Conservative Social Theory

To understand the social character of Functionalism, and to
appraise its adaptability in the face of crisis, it is important to see
that the infrastructure on which it rests is not peculiar to a business
society such as our own, or even to modern industrial societies
more generally. It is clear, for example, that if we wanted to
understand the social role of the Catholic Church, it would be
important to remember that it docs not exist only in capitalist
societies, that it has existed in a variety of previous, very different
economies, and that, as institutions go, it is a rather old one.
There is an important sense in which much the same may be said
about Functionalism.

Most particularly, the infrastructure on which Functionalism
rests is a very ancient one, and its existence can, in some important
respects, be traced back through European history to the pre-
Christian era. The infrastructure of Functionalism cannot be
understood solely as the product of a capitalist culture or of a
middle-class or industrial society. This infrastructure does not
become a type of modern sociology until fused with a scientific
technostructure which is relatively new, yet this should not obscure
the fact that the infrastructure itself is something much older and
deeper. The infrastructure of Functionalism is consequential for
the latter's ability to cope with the crisis it faces and to adapt to
new' situations within our own society or, for that matter, in
societies that differ importantly from ours. For this reason, I shall
attempt to document the antiquity of this infrastructure by com-
paring it, on a number of points, with that which may be found

A 19

From Plato to Parsons 4 *3

in one of the oldest systematic accounts of the human condition in
the Western tradition, namely, Platonic theory.

My motive in doing this is not to demonstrate that Alfred North
Whitehead was right in holding that all subsequent philosophy has
been in the nature of a series of footnotes on Plato. And it is cer-
tainly not to demonstrate that the Greeks said it all, first! My point
is, rather, that both Platonic and Functionalist theory have been
rooted in an infrastructure, a set of domain assumptions and
sentiments, that has been significantly consistent and that each,
Platonic Philosophy and Functionalist Sociology, is, in part, to be
understood as the expression of this common infrastructure that
has been culturally transmitted and socially reproduced for some
two thousand years. In short, my argument directs attention to the
possible importance of a common, underlying, enduring pattern
for understanding the social character and for appraising the future
of Functionalism.

This comparison may seem an odd one, perhaps particularly to
those sociologists who believe that theirs is a "young,” immature,
or adolescent discipline. It implies that the claim about the “youth”
of Functional Sociology is a dubious one, if this is meant to refer
to the most basic assumptions and sentiments with which it
examines man and society. This, in turn, implies that those who
speak of the youth of sociology have centered their conception of
and hopes for sociology — far more narrowly than theincomplaints
about "dust-bowl” empiricism might lead one to suspect — on the
development of techniques and methods of research. The similar-
ities to be shown between the infrastructures of Functionalism and
Platonism will also imply that the development of Functionalism’s
substantive sociological theory has been operating within far more
rigid limits than one might be led to think by the detailed technical
elaborations given this theory’ during the last twenty-five years. A
comparison between Platonism and Functionalism will imply, then,
that such theoretical developments as have been made by the
latter have often been variations on (and within) certain limited
and ancient themes. The image of Academic Sociology that emerges
is, in its dominant form, of a marriage between an octogenarian
dowager and a young stud, between an ancient infrastructure and
modem science. Fascinated by the new sciences, bent on assimi-
lating and emulating them, Academic Sociology has scarcely
noticed that its energies have often been leashed by the venerable
lady ensconced in the new’ household.

414

The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

tiie partially good world

We might begin by remembering that Plato 1 insists that God is
good, which means that he has created everything "for the best.”
In the Laws, he maintains that men would do well to remember
that each thing, down to the smallest, was created to perform a
certain role in the world, and that each has its place in the cosmic
organism. Plato begins with a kind of “teleological” Functionalism
— assuming, that is, that the fit and goodness of things are not
accidental but are brought about by mind. In the social world, as
in the cosmos more generally, Plato feels that each thing has a
special niche for which it has been intended in the larger world
organism and, indeed, that each man has, and should adhere to,
the special and single role in which he can best serve the society
as a whole.

Plato, however, soon comes to believe that, while each thing was
initially created for the best, it did not long remain that way.
(From Plato’s viewpoint, the Athens that killed his teacher and
comrade, Socrates, was certainly far from the best city.) Plato,
therefore, retreated from teleological Functionalism to his Theory
of Ideas or Eternal Forms. In the latter theory, he says that things
are the way they are not because this is "for the best,” but insofar
as they partake of their Ideal Form, a kind of hyper-spatially
located Eternal Idea. Yet since Plato holds that God has used these
Ideal Forms to impose an initial patterning on things, then, insofar
as tilings do conform to an Ideal Form, they still have some, but a
corrupted, good in them. The theory of Ideal Forms thus entails
a kind of chastened Functionalism.

Although not teleological, Functional Sociolog)' also began with
an assumption that things in the social world are “functionaF or,
more plainly, for the best. The “trick of the game” was to find out
how. How this was so, the way in which this happened, was the
puzzle that the sociologist had to solve. Functionalists were en-
joined to explain the persistence of seemingly senseless social
patterns by diligently searching out the “hidden” ways in which
they tvere functional or useful. As the English anthropologist,
Audrey Richards, has understated it, this sometimes led to certain
Procrustean explanations. Yet just as Platonism came to recognize
that some things in the world were clearly not for the best, so did
Functionalists come to recognize that social patterns should not
be examined solely from the standpoint of their “functions” but

From Plato to Parsons 4*5

also from the standpoint of their "ch/sfunctions” they might, in
effect, have a “corrupted” side to them.

And just as Platonism postulated that there are certain universal
and Eternal Ideas, so did Functionalists postulate that social
systems have certain “needs,” “functional requisites,” or "system
problems.” These, like Plato's Ideas, were also universal and
eternal; and it is believed that, if men fail to satisfy or conform
with their requirements, this produces difficulties and problems
for social systems. Both theories, then, had an ahistorical approach
to human disorders, and both centered their attention on ills that
were not peculiar to any one time, place, or social system.

AMBIVALENCE TOWARD SOCIETY

Partly for this reason both Functionalism and Platonism also con-
tain an ambivalence toward the status quo; both provide a basis
for social criticism, but only a limited criticism, a criticism from
within. The sources of such a limitation are built into some of the
central domain assumptions of each theory.

In operating with a theory of Eternal Ideas or Forms, Platonism,
for example, was provided with a basis for criticizing existent social
institutions. It never had to say that “whatever is, is right.” Since
it assumed that the world of men participated in the Eternal Forms
only imperfectly, Platonism could be assured that whatever is, is
partly corrupt. Platonism could therefore take a critical and nega-
tive view of the world around it. But the theory of Eternal Forms
also postulates that, if the social world is corrupt, this is because it
is an inadequate copy of some Eternal Idea. Now, if every existent
institution, say slaver)’, has somewhere a perfect and harmonious
model of it — an Eternal Idea — then slavery must in some form be
indispensable. The theory of Ideas, then, encourages a criticism of
the very institutions for which, at the same time, it provides an
apology. It was thus only the historically transient expressions of
slavery that were criticized by Plato, but never the institution of
slavery itself. The theory of Ideas implies that slavery was sound
in its fundamental essence, even if corrupt in its historical form.
While Platonism presented itself as an impartial and nonpartisan
theory of social order, it was, however, a theory that postulated the
permanence of some form of slavery. While Platonism presented
itself as a theory of social order in general, valid for all time and

416 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

all societies, it was, in fact, a social theory of a very limited kind
of social order.

A similar contradiction permeates Functional theory, for a similar
reason. Corresponding to the Platonist’s Eternal Forms, Function-
alists postulate that there are certain universal requisites or needs
of social systems. On the one hand, the concept of Functional
Requisites provides a potential standard for social criticism;
societies that fail on these requirements are deemed flawed, and
are seen as lacking in ways that will require remedy. On the other
hand, because these Requisites are viewed as universal, as always
required for the stability of all societies, they can also be used to
provide an apologia for the status quo and to restrict change. In
postulating a set of Universal Requisites of society. Functionalism
postulates that, even if a society might be reformed in some ways,
there are other profound ways in which it cannot be reformed and
which men must accept. While Functional theory thus has both
critical and apologetic tendencies, these mutually inhibit one
another, and Functionalists are, at most, disposed only to a limited
criticism of society. When it becomes involved in the world, then,
Functionalism may be assimilated into an “administrative” soci-
ology that can be used by organizations as a tool to change the
social world, but only within very restricted limits.

Both Functionalism and Platonism are thus similar, but not
identical, in their critical postures. Both theories provide similar
ports of entry for ideological commitments. One port of entry is
found at the point where the theorist must formulate particular
specifications of an Eternal Form or of a Universal Requisite. For
example, Plato does not believe that “dirt” or “hair” have Eternal
Forms, but he believes that slavery does. Why one and not the
other? There is also room for ideology when a decision is made
about the level of abstraction in terms of which the postulated
Requisite or Form will be formulated. For example, instead of
postulating that “slavery” has an Eternal Form or is a Universal
Requisite of societies, one could just as logically postulate some
“system of production,” of which slavery might be .one possible, but
not a necessary, Form. In choosing the level of abstraction for
formulating a Universal Requisite or Form, the theorist has
ample opportunity to express and protect his own ideological
commitments.

There is another and more general way in which these elements,
in both Platonism and Functionalism, embody ideological com-
mitments. Both place their central value on social stability and
order, on permanence rather than on change and growth. This is
clearly inherent in the Platonic Theory of Forms, for these are
conceived of as eternal and unchanging. Correspondingly, the

From Plato to Parsons

417

Functionalist notion of Functional Requisites specifies Eternal
Requisites of social stability, not Requisites of change. To know
the conditions necessary for stability — which is what is focal to
and specified by the Functional Requisites — is not to. know the
conditions necessary and sufficient for any kind of a social change.
Both theories thus focus on the need and strategies for social order
and not on the need and strategies for social change.

The concept of Functional Requisites is objectionable, not be-
cause it provides a general reminder that all social worlds operate
within some limits, but because it states that all social worlds
operate within the same limits. A warning that all men must have
some limits would be salutary. An insistence that all men have the
same limits is merely arbitrary. When a social theorist in the
ig6o’s claims, in effect, that he knows the ways in which all
societies, from here to eternity, from Planet Earth to Planet Venus,
must be limited, he is affirming a metaphysics of society. This is
not objectionable as such, but is objectionable to the extent that
those accepting it fail to see it as a metaphysics and, most
especially, when they lack awareness of the way values are built
into it. Having masked one’s own values in a set of assumptions
about the way the social world is, a theorist may then proceed
without having to specify what his values are or even having to
admit that they exist. Now, the theorist need only say: this is the
way the world is; how convenient that it corresponds to the way I
think it should be. This is what Macaulay did, for example, when
he proclaimed that “universal suffrage is incompatible with the
very existence of civilization.” When social theorists affirm the
existence of certain eternal limits in the social universe, they axe
creating real limits, but only on their own intellectual creativity.

IS EVIL REAL?

Plato was much perplexed about whether every specific particular
had an Ideal Form or Idea to which it somehow, if only partially,
corresponded. Does dirt, mud, or hair have an Ideal Form which
it approximates, he had asked of the young Socrates. From' Plato’s
viewpoint the answer to this embarrassing question must be and
was, no. This implies that, for Plato, “dirt” — more generally, “evil”
— is unreal; lacking an ideal form it lacks true being. From Plato’s
standpoint evil is not a positive or real thing, but rather the absence

418 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

of the good; it is a negative and residual category. In other terms,
the domains of the real and of value are seen as coextensive and
isomorphic.

To the Sociological Functionalist also, social evil — the dysfunc-
tional — is similarly negative and lacking in true being. It is the
failure to satisfy a social need, to conform with a system require-
ment, to solve a system problem. Dysfunctions entail failure to
comply with a tacitly premised need. They are, in that sense,
“negative” things that happen when the “right” thing is lacking,
because of the breakdown of a mechanism of social control,
through the deficient training of the young or others, or because of
the absence of regulative values. To the Functionalist, socially
nonvalued things are not simply empirically different from the
functional; that is, it is not simply that they have different conse-
quences or are made evident by different signs but rather, that
they are also less real. Nothing could make this clearer than Par-
sons’ inclination to think of all departures from his normatively
centered models as aberrations, minor flaws, or secondary contra-
dictions.

THE WORLD AS GOOD AND EVIL

If both Platonism and Functionalism agree that evil is not real,
they tend also to split good and evil apart, and each assigns good
to one realm and evil to another. In neither theory is it possible for
both good and evil to be intrinsic parts of one and the same realm.
Reality is not contradictory. The theories differ, however, in one
crucial respect, which concerns the realm to which the world of
ordinary men and everyday appearances is assigned.

Platonism held that such good as the world manifested was not
its own; the good came from outside, from God acting through the
Eternal Forms. If left to its own devices, the world would be ex-
pected to drift back toward chaos and disorder. Platonism, there-
fore, vacillated between responding to the world either with a re-
coiling absolute no, or with a dogged partial no; but there was
little question of a partial yes, and still less of an absolute yes. It
was not the world and man, but God and the Forms that were
good. Platonism’s first impulse was therefore to say yes to a good
that was not conceived as being of this world and, correspondingly,
to say no to a world that it conceived of as corrupted.

From Plato to Parsons

419

Functionalism’s answer to the half-full/half -empty glass of water
problem was different, because it located the good in the world, or
at least in a part of it. Functionalism saw good as being intrinsic
to the social world, and evil as not being so. If left to its own de-
vices, the Parsonsian social system would not drift entropically into
disorder, but would have a perpetual equilibrium; it is immortal. It
is this aspect of the structure of sentiment that Functionalism em-
bodies — its “optimism” — that sometimes conveys a strange air of
unreality to those whose feelings and assumptions differ and that
makes it seem not only conservative but naive. Yet it is also the
related side of Functionalism, its feeling that evil in society is not
real, that makes it compatible with a liberal sensibility. Feeling that
society is intrinsically good, it looks around itself tolerantly and
views social problems as surmountable imperfections. Functional-
ism is thus disposed to see the glass as half-full rather than half-
empty, and to give a partial yes to the world. This is its optimism.

Functionalism did not remove the split between good and evil,
however, but only rearranged it. Indeed, it built the old split into
the world. It defined society as good-and-real, but it cast a shadow
on the goodness and the reality of man. Society thus conceived is
the hidden godhead; it is the sociological equivalent of Plato’s God-
and-Etemal-Forms. The Functionalist split between the semi-real-
man-who-lacks-true-humanness-apart-from-society and real-society-
from-whom-all-humanness-flows reproduces within the world a
split akin to that which Plato created between the world and God-
and-the-Eternal-Forms. Functionalism assigns to man the very
ephemeral properties that Plato had assigned to matter. Function-
alist man is good-and-real only insofar as he is filled with and
shaped by a power above him, but he is otherwise intrinsically
chaotic, filled with lawlessness, or else is simply empty.

NO SOCIETY, NO HUMANNESS

In both views, then, men are viewed as lacking reality, or true
humanness, apart from their involvement in or dependence upon
either God or Society. Men are thus a kind of raw material. It is no
idle academic exercise but a small-scale morality play that is being
enacted when the sociology textbook brandishes before the student
the dreadful example of the “feral child” — or the maltreated and
isolated child — who, abandoned of contact with the nourishing

420 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociolog)'

mother society, grows up witless. The catechism is: no society, no
humanness. Yet dogs and cats can be surfeited with human atten-
tion but never learn to do more than bark or purr. What the Func-
tionalist does not say is that society is no more than a necessary
condition for humanness and is certainly not a sufficient condition
of it. Witness the ants. What the Sociological Functionalist largely
leaves out, very much as the Platonist deplores it, is a simple thing,
the human body, a human race, with a distinctive kind of anatomy,
physiology, and biology. “Oh, that!” says the Functionalist, which
is not far from saying “Damn that!” as the Platonist did.

It is probably no more mistaken to say that societies are the raw
material of homo sapiens than to regard homo sapiens as the raw
material of societies. Humanness is surely the result only of an
interaction between the biological species homo sapiens and so-
ciety. And if one is to be told that societies have enabled the species
to better satisfy their biological needs and to survive the rigors of
nature, we might reply that sometimes it is only through the joys
that a body permits that human beings have been able to survive
the rigors of society.

The impulse of both Platonism and Functionalism to view men
as the raw materials of society is related to the organismic meta-
phor in terms of which both view society. Such a metaphor secretes
an unctuous pathos in whose cozy blur society becomes not only
a reality independent of man but something that is and should be
over him, or into which he smoothly fits or should be made to fit.
The organismic metaphor is plain enough in Plato. Its counterpart
in Functional theory is the concept of a social system, which is an
abstraction from and formalization of earlier organismic models
still quite evident, for example, in Durkheim’s and Parsons’ work.
The Functionalist model is explicitly a system model, but under-
lying that is the tacit background assumption and image of an
organism whose parts are not merely interconnected but must work
together and be subordinated to the interests of the whole. Both
Functionalism and Platonism, then, are infused with a metaphysi-
cal passion for “oneness.” As I have shown in Chapter 6, it is one
of the central thrusts underlying Parsons’ conception of the role of
“Grand Theory” to exhibit the wholeness of the social world and,
indeed, through his “general theory of action,” to find one theoreti-
cal language that can unify the diverse social sciences.

From Plato to Parsons

421

THE METAPHYSICS OF HIERARCHY

Underneath the organismic image’s rhetoric of interdependence
there is the spiny substance of hierarchy. It is a function of an
organismic image to make a centralized administration of the divi-
sion of labor, in which some command and some obey, seem in-
tuitively appealing, by making this social arrangement appear to be
part of an eternal and immutable order. Both Platonism and Socio-
logical Functionalism focus on the social mechanisms by which
men are molded and shaped, by which norms are imposed upon
them, and by which they are made to want what a particular social
system happens to require. In benignly labeling these as mech-
anisms of “social control” or as forms of education or "socializa-
tion,” it is clear that Functionalism regards them not simply as
requisites but as “goods,” for they might no less accurately be
termed mechanisms of "domination.” And since both Functionalism
and Platonism conceive of values as imprintable or transmissibles,
both theories tend to divide mankind into two groups, into masses
and elites, into those who are to be educated and those who are to
educate them. Both theories thus operate with and require a hier-
archical metaphysics. In Plato we need not look far for this, for he
tells us so. The entire cosmos is a hierarchy to Plato, and hierar-
chy, he believes, must prevail in all its parts.

One finds a similar metaphysics of hierarchy in Functionalism.
This is plainly revealed in E. A. Shils’ encomiums to “Authority.”
Again, it is instructive to recall those occasional shots-in-the-library
exchanged between Melvin Tumin and such (one-time) spokesmen
of Functionalism as Wilbert Moore and Kingsley Davis. Moore
and Davis argued that some form of social stratification was in-
herent in society. What makes their position metaphysical is that
they did not simply affirm the functionality of a specific form of
stratification in some time and place, but rather insisted that some
social stratification is universally necessary. When someone asserts
that something about society’ is going to be true forever and ever,
he is likely to be expressing a domain assumption or a metaphysical
comiction that existed prior to his specific argument on its behalf;
the felt cogency of the specific argument probably derives as much
from the way it resonates the domain assumption as from its internal
logic. One ought further to be aware of the ideological resonance
of this specific metaphysics, namely, that if the social world is for
all time divided into rulers and ruled, then equality is a dream;

422 The Coining Crisis of Western Sociology

some must and should dominate others; only “evil” — social disorder,
tension, or conflict — can come from efforts to remove the domi-
nation of man by man or to make fundamental changes in the
character of authority.

AN ORDERLY WORLD

A central similarity of Platonism and Sociological Functionalism
is their common disposition to take as their key intellectual prob-
lem, and their central moral value, a concern with social order.
Rather than focusing, as they conceivably might and as other
social theories have, on freedom, equality, or happiness, both
Platonism and Functionalism place their intellectual and moral
center of gravity elsewhere. A key concern of Functionalists, no
less than Plato, is that social systems should be orderly — not free,
not equal, not happy — and both largely believe that this depends
on men’s conformity with their society’s shared values. Indeed,
both theories account for social order in very similar ways; both
focus on and give special stress to the role of shared moral values
as central sources of social order. Plato, for example, says that
men do not quarrel over things that can be weighed or counted,
but over different ideas of Justice and the Good, of what is dear
or valuable. For Plato the intellectual task was to discover what
men should believe or value. Functionalism is the descriptive
counterpart of Platonic moralism. For much of Functionalism
the crucial intellectual task is to show how values (especially
shared values, conceived of in certain ways I shall soon discuss)
contribute to social order. This has been the stress of the entire
theoretical tradition from which Functionalism evolved, through
Durkheim and, earlier, through Auguste Comte.

As a result of the special place that they assign to shared values
as a source of social order, both Platonism and Functional Soci-
ology (from Durkheim to Parsons) also place a special emphasis
on early education and socialization, and thereby on the processes
through which values are internalized in persons. The Platonic
stress on the socialization of children was every bit as emphatic
as that of the Functionalists. Plato not only emphasized the im-
portance of formal tuition but went on to stress the significance
even of children’s games and play behavior for the stability of the
entire society, and he manifested a great concern for what is now

From Plato to Parsons 423

called "youth culture." Unlike Jean Piaget, for example, who is
sensitive to the ways in which children may, in part, generate their
own values, both Functionalism and Platonism conceive of values
in their character as transmissibles rather than as emergents. Both
Platonism and Functionalism thus see values as “imprintables” —
that is, as patterns that are initially outside of the persons to whom
they are to be transmitted — and both are much concerned with the
way values may be put inside persons.

To the Functionalist this "outside” is, of course, the parent or the
teacher; in a larger sense it is the “culture,” or in Emile Durkheim’s
language, the "collective conscience.” To Plato, the outside source
is, cosmically, the Idea or Form that God imprints upon matter; in
fact, he conceives of this Form as coexistent with and outside of
God himself. Since both the Functionalist and the Platonist see
values as coming from outside of and, indeed, from above the
things on which they will be imprinted, neither, therefore, ever
fully confronts the question of how values themselves emerge,
develop, and change. Values are conceived of not so much as
man-made but as man -transmitted and man-received things.

Since both conceive of externally derived values as the source
of individual control, both theories entail an image of men as
inherently lacking built-in self-regulators, and as needing control
from something outside of and above themselves if social order is
to be maintained. In neither theory, therefore, is “man the measure
of all things.” To the Platonist the measure is “God,” and to the
Functionalist it is “society.” These are the imprinters of value.

THE LEGITIMATE AND THE AUTHENTIC

Functionalists do not seem particularly aware of the way in which
the concepts of “values” and "legitimacy” have assumed for them
a kind of heightened pathos and almost sacred potency, much as
the “goods of the soul” had for Plato. From a different standpoint,
one that focuses not on the socially legitimate and the value-
sanctioned but on the “authentic,” it would be not right or moral
behavior that would be invested with a special reliance but, instead,
behavior that expresses personal conviction and is deeply felt.
“Authenticity” is indicated by a congruence between what men
want — as distinct from what they should want — and what they
do. It is indicated by a congruence between choice and personal

424 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

conviction. “Legitimacy,” however, is indicated by the congruence
between what men want or do, on the one hand, and moral values
on the other.

To those concerned with the problem of values and legitimacy,
the implicitly held conception is of the “true self” as the value-
embedded self, the self formed around certain socially sanctioned
values and certain socially legitimated identities. To those, how-
ever, concerned with authenticity, the "true self” is one moved by
any strong desire or strangely claimed identity, including those that
are body-linked and regardless of whether they are lowly or dis-
reputable from the viewpoint of "respectable” claims. In making
this distinction, my intention is to indicate that there is more than
one conception of self for which a social theory can opt, and that
the Functionalist has tacitly opted for an “Apollonian” rather than
a “Dionysian” self, although he seems scarcely aware that he has
these and other alternatives, let alone that he has chosen among
them.

The difference between Functionalism’s concern for legitimacy
and a concern for authenticity reflects the difference between the
former’s devotion to the claims of society and the latter’s some-
what greater concern with the claims of individuals. It is, in part,
a difference in the basepoints for judgment. Functionalism focuses
on the need of men to conform with their social roles and social
values as these have been received, and not on the need to change
them. It is the requirements of these roles and values and of the
society that they constitute that are problematic for Sociological
Functionalism, and not the needs of individuals, which are taken
as given.

A stress on authenticity implies that a concern with the claims
of society is necessary but not enough either for the fulfillment of
individuals or even for the effective operation of society. In the
modem world, conformity and success are somehow increasingly
experienced as disappointing, even by those who pursue and
achieve them. The ‘lonely crowd” is not composed of the outcasts
and failures alone; it is the failure of successful conformity to
produce gratification that is at the bottom of the modern plea for
authenticity.

The search for authenticity implies that some kinds of con-
formity are self -deceiving, self-destructive, and life-wasting. One of
the central reasons for this is that there are very different motives
that may lead men to conform. It is obvious, for example, that men
may conform because they truly believe the claims made upon
them are right and proper. But it is also obvious that they may
conform simply out of expediency, to cut their losses or to build
their winnings, without any conviction concerning the propriety of

From Plato to Parsons 4 2 5

their behavior. It is one thing to believe in the propriety of a claim
because it itself is experienced as intrinsically right, but another
to accept the claim because one wants to be approved or loved by
others, or because one is afraid. It is one thing to believe in the
propriety of a claim that, when given conformity, is experienced
as gratifying, and another to so believe despite one’s own disap-
pointment when conformity is given. It is one thing to believe in
the propriety of a claim because it is intrinsically satisfying to
conform with it; it is quite another to believe in its propriety
because one has a need to feel safely at home among others.

The central consideration, however, is that our very commitment
to a system of moral values invariably creates an interest in
seeming to be, and seeming to do, what the values require. Our
most idealistic commitments therefore induce us to deceive our-
selves and to lie to others. It is not only egoistic self-interest but
morality as well that is a root of “bad faith.” It is thus not only
when men conform without belief, but when their very belief leads
them to continuing self-deception, that men may manifest inau-
thenticity.

If the advocate of authenticity says that it is not enough to
conform, he also recognizes that some men may, nonetheless,
conform authentically; legitimacy and authenticity are not neces-
sarily at odds. Individuals can truly want what they should want.
Nor, in this view, is deviance an invariable guarantee of au-
thenticity, for deviance from the values of one group may be
motivated by a conformity with the values of another that may
be no less mindless, even if this other is a small and unpopular
group. There remains, in short, the question of the authenticity of
deviance no less than of conformity.

DEVIANCE AND ANOMIE

Still another similarity between Platonism and Functionalism is
to be found in their explanation of deviant behavior, which both
often approach in fundamentally the same manner. Having the
advantage of some two thousand years, Functionalists have, of
course, developed the theory importantly, but the basic structure of
the explanation of deviance frequently remains the same in both
Platonism and Functionalism. To both, deviant behavior often
involves a “falling away” from something, a departure from or

426 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

lack of something, particularly of certain kinds of moral norms

that is, in Durkheim’s revealing term, a “poverty of morality,” .

Central to the Functionalist’s explanation of deviance has always
been the concept of anomie, which, of course, comes from the
Greek concept of anomos, meaning without law, lacking in re-
straint, devoid of temperance, form, or pattern. It is to be without
morality. This approach to deviant behavior is fundamentally dif-
ferent, in its most basic model, from, say, the Freudian or the
Marxian, in which tensions are not necessarily seen as due to the
lack of something, but may, indeed, derive from conformity with
certain moral values or may be due to a conflict between opposing
forces, all of which are simultaneously present.

One of the merits of Robert Merton’s theory of anomie is that,
tacitly basing itself on certain Marxian domain assumptions —
especially those concerning the “internal contradictions” of a
system — it pointed to the manner in which a commitment to
certain culturally transmitted values may, when unrealizable, in-
duce anomie. But here too the pathological terminus, anomie itself,
entails an ultimate renunciation of or disbelief in the socially
shared values. Yet it is not only the unrealizability of such values
that may sometimes warp a man, but all the things that he can
and must do to realize them successfully; there is the sickness of
the successful. And correspondingly, one might add (but usually
does not) that when a man pursues goals he has been taught to
prize, and then finds them unrealizable, it is quite sensible for him
to renounce these goals; there is, then, a rationality in deviance.

The central civic pathology with which Plato concerned himself
was “injustice,” and he saw this as entailing a lack of restraint
such as arises when men fail to mind their own business, when
they violate the Socratic rule, “One Man, One Task,” and when
they do not limit themselves to performing their own role obliga-
tions. To the contemporary Functionalist, “system disequilibrium”
is similarly held to arise when men fail to perform their role
obligations; when they do not confine themselves to those things
which their culture sanctions and therefore violate the expectations
of those who do.

Neither Platonism nor Functionalism seems to recognize that
when men limit themselves to what their culturally standardized
roles presently sanction, they may be prevented from acting in
ways that might remedy problems that have arisen only after the
earlier crystallization of social roles. They do not recognize that, at
some point, the world simply cannot be kept livable, unless some
men are courageous enough to shirk the duty that respectable or
powerful men around them define as theirs. (What, after all,
entitled Socrates — the son of a midwife and a stonecutter — to

From Plato to Parsons 4 2 7

become the philosophical gadfly of Athens? Certainly it was not
anyone else’s conception of his role that required this of him. It
was only his own interpretation of the Oracle of Delphi; it was, in
short, his own charisma.) Undoubtedly a man gets into trouble and
runs risks when he behaves this way, as Socrates’ life plainly testi-
fies. But the original question was not. What is a safe way for men
to live? It was, Do men and societies always benefit when men
mind their own business and limit themselves to the prerogatives
and duties of their incumbent roles? Neither Platonism nor Func-
tionalism seems to understand that there are times when men must
be intemperate and risk living without limits, for both theories are
spellbound by a sculptural Apollonian ideal of man as firmly
bounded and contained, as temperate and restrained.

It is thus characteristic of Functionalist analysis of deviance
that it centers around the acceptance and the nonacceptance of
culturally prescribed means and ends. But there is, at least, a third
choice that men have: to fight. Men’s “nonacceptance” of social
values is not the same as active struggle against those values with
which they disagree or on behalf of those in which they believe.
Conforming “ritualistically” without belief is not the same as sub-
mitting under bitter protest. Struggle, conflict, protest seem to find
no firm and distinctive place in the Functionalist inventory of
men’s responses to society, where they remain blurred and ghostly
concepts. These are clearly not forms of conformity. And it is
not enough to describe them as nonconformity, for that results in
the drug addict and the civil rights protester, those who organize
criminal syndicates and those who organize the poor to wage their
own war on poverty, those who march for peace and those who
engage in delinquent “rumbles,” being somehow all placed under
the same conceptual umbrella. In focusing on their common char-
acter as “deviants,” Functionalism sees no significant differences
in the nature of their active resistance to society. Only a marginal
reality is assigned to those who oppose social establishments ac-
tively and who struggle to change its rules and membership
requirements.

Implicit in this Functionalist perspective is an image of the
good man, the man who fits into the Functionalist image of the
good society. He does his duty in the role in which he finds himself;
he may even do it “creatively,” yet somehow he manages to remain
agreeable. No belligerent troublemaker, he is, rather, a man who
usually conforms with a will to the expectations of others. He sup-
ports authority in its efforts to bring deviants under control and is
docile even when he himself is admonished. He drinks the hemlock
when the jailer brings it.

In Functionalism’s implicit image of the good man, there has

428 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

been a fatal confusion between the sociable and the social. When
the Functionalist says that men's humanness derives from their
social experience, this tends to slide softly into the implication
that a man’s humanness derives from cooperative sociability. Yet
what makes a man human is not only the limits that others set
upon him and to tvhich he is sensitive, but also that he resents and
resists these limits when they chafe. If men cannot become human
apart from society, neither can they become persons except in the
course of some conflict with it. A man develops his human self
as much by his resistance to the requirements of his social roles,
as much by struggling against them and other persons, as by
conformity and cooperation. He is every bit as human when he
bares his teeth as v r hen he bares his heart. While human beings
are no more devil than they are angel, they are, after all, an evolved
animal species that was long and hard in the coming.

A man who never knew conflict would not be an individual
person but some kind of an appendage. Yet both Functionalism
and Platonism have been much and deeply discomfited by human
individuality, because each senses this as entailing a variation
dangerous to consensus among men and inimical to order in
society. From wives or property in common, to setting the city
distant from the sea, there is scarcely a social remedy that Plato
ever proposed that does not aim at a de-individuating consensus.
Functionalism has cautioned against that variability in men which
is at the core of individuality, not so much in open challenge to
it but in affirmation of what it takes to be higher values, social
order and the need of society for consensus. When Talcott Parsons
comes to the heart of his conception of how equilibrium may be
maintained in the relations among men, he sees it as derived from
the willingness of each to do as the other expects, which ultimately
requires both to share the same value system.

THE COSTS OF CONFORMITY

Neither Platonism nor Functionalism sees the full danger in the
restriction of gratification, for each is primarily concerned that
men live in conformity with morality; and each tends to assume,
rather than show, that such conformity produces gratifications.
Neither Platonist nor Functionalist recognizes that conformity is
a social product whose supply may glut the market and bring a

From Plato to Parsons 429

small price. Plato attempts to reassure men that a life of virtue will
make them happy, although he somewhat vitiates this reassur-
ance by remarking that he might say this even if it were untrue.
Functionalists, for their part, seek to close the gap between prac-
ticed conformity and experienced gratification by focusing on the
extent to which gratifications are learned, by stressing human
plasticity and men’s capacity to derive gratification from almost
anything. In effect, Functionalists deal with the observable gap
between conformity and gratification by holding that it is, in prin-
ciple, possible to socialize men to want no more than others are
trained to provide them willingly, and to provide willingly no less
than others are trained to want. That no human society known
has ever succeeded in living up to this principle is treated as owing
to failures merely idiosyncratic to each society, not as intrinsic to
the human condition.

Far from seeing the costs of conformity and the rewards of non-
conformity, Functionalists and Platonists focus on the rewards of
conformity and the costs of deviance. One would never guess from
reading Functionalist texts on socialization that training children
can be a continual room-to-room battle, invariably exhausting to
parents and frequently repellent to the children. (In this respect,
Plato was immensely more realistic.) Instead of stressing that
men’s quest for gratification has a healthful side, both stress its
dangers. Rather than seeing the dangers in the restriction of men’s
quests for gratification, they stress the necessity of such restriction.
Both have theories of deviance which are less disturbed by the
failure of gratification than by the failure of restraint. They assume
that the quest for individual gratification must at some point fail,
but that the demand for individual restraint need not; yet this last
assumption is as utopian as the first is prudent. In this, once again,
the Functionalist reveals that he tacitly takes society and not man
as the measure; he is usually more concerned to protect society
from the failure of individual restraint than to protect the indi-
vidual from society’s failure to gratify him.

Both theories commonly stress that social stability requires the
internalization of moral values that restrict and control the pursuit
of gratification. Both theories commonly neglect analysis of the
ways in which social stability may be enhanced by increasing
men’s gratifications, either by developing technologies that increase
abundance, by reorganizing the mechanisms that allocate differ-
ential incomes, or by freeing men from an unthinking bondage
to an earlier training that makes adult gratification needlessly
difficult. Platonism and Functionalism thus differ deeply from
both Freudianism and Marxism; The basic goal of these latter — as
distinct from their means — is to free men from outmoded social

43° The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

and character structures and, through this, to enable them to enjoy
greater fulfillment and development. Platonism and Functionalism,
in contrast, aim at inducing men to live a value-disciplined exist-
ence, and both endorse a conception of values as that which shapes
and disciplines the appetites, and produces unfreedom.

INSATIABLE MAN

Pinning their hopes for stability on a moral restriction of men’s
wants rather than on efforts to increase their satisfactions, neither
Platonism nor Functionalism takes serious account of the vast
productive powers of science and technology. Underlying this is
the assumption that men are inherently insatiable. This assumption
serves, in effect, as a justification for ignoring the great variations
in economies and their enormous differences in scarcity and
abundance. Assume that men are insatiable, then all economies
must, relative to these insatiable wants, be essentially alike; all are
economies of scarcity. The assumption that men are insatiable is
a domain or metaphysical assumption. It is usually notable that
this assumption is in the nature of a complaint, but it is, of course,
a complaint about others, not about the self. It is the time-worn
complaint of the well-fed against the hungry, of the oligarch
against the demos, of the entrenched elitist against the reformist
egalitarian, of the enlightened philosopher against the ignorant
“common man.” Those complaining of the insatiability of others
tacitly imply their own freedom from the malaise, and they thus
belie the very universality that they attribute to human insatiability.

It may be that insatiability will, in time, prove a temporary and
historically limited problem. Indeed, it may in the end be a problem
of much less danger to society than the situation that breeds ennui
and boredom and thus loosens men’s hold on life. “Need and
struggle are what excite and inspire us,” said William James, “our
hour of triumph is what brings the void.” Insatiable men at least
want something and, therefore, will remain involved in their
groups and cultures, if only to attack them. Thus, while insatiability
has, from Plato to Parsons, commonly been assumed to be purely
pathological, it may, nonetheless, have a benign side; it may stave
off the “void" and serve to keep successful men contributing to
group life.

From Plato to Parsons 431

Impulse-negating values, appetite-restricting values, values con-
ceived as restraints, are especially needed in an economy of
scarcity. For here, men will be dangerously tempted to get what
they want — and indeed, may only be able to do so — by taking it
away from somebody else. The historical development of so-called
“spiritual” values occurs in economies of scarcity, where they serve
and are needed as a restraint on men who may be prompted to
improve their lot by injuring others. The “goods of the soul,” as
Socrates calls spiritual values, are distinguished by the fact that
they cannot be won from or lost to others, and they cannot be
depleted. Spiritual values are thus like the magical pitcher of milk;
they can never be emptied and always have sustenance enough for
everyone. The problem of material scarcity is solved by creating a
substitute, spiritual abundance. But spiritual values that are used
to keep deprived men quiet come in time to be viewed as a form of
social fraud, and they serve as a mechanism of domination by those
who do have material abundance over those who do not. In both
Platonism and Functionalism, morality is tacitly invited to serve
as a substitute for productivity.

Sociological Functionalism, like Platonism, has a strong vein
of underground asceticism in it. It entails a tacit dualism of body
and mind, in which mind or “self” is the higher and better part. It
is a social theory that hardly acknowledges that men have bodies.
Scarcely ever, in its many studies of factories, offices, hospitals,
and political parties, does it take note of the fact that organization
members have a gender. Hardly ever does it consider sex except as
a force in reproduction, to fulfill the “Universal Requisite of
society.” Nor does it intimate that “socializing” the resultant chil-
dren is a struggle that requires, among other things, abundant
physical energy or sheer good health. Talcott Parsons, for example,
formulates his conception of the “social system” in such a way as
to exclude from it the elements of man’s biological constitution,
physiological functioning, physical and ecological surround, his
tools, machines, and other material artifacts — even though the
last three are all directly made by men themselves — and banishes
them to the environment of social systems. This is a kind of
academic exorcism of man’s baser animal nature, a form' of
theoretical purification. It is an effort to use social theory to do
what ascetic religions and philosophies have sought to do for
centuries. Modem Sociological Functionalism focuses on “social
systems” that are seen primarily as systems of symbolic interaction,
not between embodied men but between disembodied “role players”;
between psychic “selves” who communicate-from-a-distance but
who seem never to touch, to hold, to feed, to strike, to caress.

432 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

Functionalism, then, is a sociology of asceticism; it is a sociolog)'
of angels-without-wings. It is a sociological version of the Platonic
dualism between the body and the soul.

PESSIMISM: DEATH AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

Can there be any significant similarity, however, between Func-
tionalism with its optimism and Platonism with its thick vein of
pessimism? Can there be any similarity between Parsons, who
tends to see ours as the best possible of worlds, ever growing better,
and Plato, who believed that in the end all fails, and who said:
“Human affairs are hardly worth considering in earnest and yet we
must be in earnest about them — a sad necessity constrains us.”
Here we must return for a closer, more probing and patient look
at Parsonsian "optimism.”

Clarification of this problem will require us to see that there are
different things to which pessimism or optimism can be attached,
and that optimism can exist at one but not necessarily another level.
Parsons differs from Plato, because his focal concern is with the
social condition, while Plato’s is with the human condition. Parsons
is optimistic about the social but not the human condition. Indeed,
Parsons and Plato are both pessimistic about the human condition,
and their pessimism at this level is, in both cases, linked to the
same problem: human death. But since Parsons does not normally
focus on this human level, his pessimism about it remains sub-
sidiary and is rarely exposed. For Plato, by contrast, the human
and social condition are not separated sharply and his focal atten-
tion is given over to the encompassing human condition; hence
his pessimism is more visible. The manifest optimism that Parsons
has about the social condition is, I shall suggest below, not only
coexistent with a subsidiary pessimism about the human condition
but also is to be understood as an effort to combat pessimism on
various levels.

To most Greeks of Plato’s time, death was regarded as “the
bitterest of evils,” and concern with death was a central component
of Greek pessimism. Plato attempts to combat this pessimism by
seeking a rational basis on which men can believe in such im-
mortality as they may have, immortality of the soul. While there
are important ways in which Plato succumbs to pessimism and
surrenders to death, his search for a rational proof of the im-

From Plato to Parsons

mortality of the soul expresses a fantasy-wish to live forever; it
is a denial of death. Again, his conception of the Eternal Fo rms
as the truest existence is a resistance to the natural corruption that
overtakes the things of this world; it is a fight against death. Death
was a focal anxiety to Plato and to the Greeks of his time; but to
Parsons, as to most other Americans — perhaps, in part, because
we live so much longer than the Greeks did — death is normallv
only a matter of hidden, subsidiary attention, although still deepiv
laden with anxiety. Nevertheless, defccalized though this anxietv
may be, one of Parsons' most flatly pessimistic statements, that
“tragedy is of the essence of the human condition.'' appears in
conjunction with a discussion of death and religion.

Parsons' statement on death is worth auotfim here, for its stvle
is both characteristically tortured and revealing. He tells us that
“the fact that though we all know we have to die almost no man
knows when he will die is one of the cardinal facts of the human
situation." 1 In this ambiguous statement, it is not the fact that men
must die — and not even that all hnow this — that is “cardinal" but.
rather, that few know when. In effect, it is not the fact of inevitable
death that is accented in this formulation — indeed, it is blurred —
but rather the anxiety and uncertainty about its timing. Parsons
thus quickly slides over the fact of inevitable death as such-, he only
implies it. But even if he obscures the matter, it is clear that, for
Parsons, the source of the tragic is somewhere in the vicinity of
death; it is death-linked.

Parsons' sentiments are thus split concerning different levels of
human existence. He is, indeed, optimistic, glowingly optimistic, as
we have seen repeatedly, about social systems and especially about
American society. His pessimism is tied to another level: it is man.
individual, embodied man, that he is pessimistic about. His pes-
simism, in contrast to Plato's, does not encompass man's refrac-
toriness, limitations, or irrationality, for all these are somehow
manageable by “socialization.” His pessimism centers more nar-
rowly on man’s mortality, the “tragic essence" of the human condi-
tion. Over and against man's animal mortality. Parsons designs a
"social system” that, with its battery of defenses and equilibrating
derices, need never run down. What Parsons has done is to assign
to the self-maint ainin g social system an immortality transcending
and compensatory for man’s perishability. It is thus that Parsons
scdal system extrudes all embodied mortal beings and. inceed.
almost any kind of perishable “matter," and the system is instead
constructed of “role players” or roles and statuses that transcend
and outlive men. Much of Parsons' theoretical effort, then. is. I
suspect, an effort to combat death. But it does entail a denial not

434 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

only of the death of individuals, but also of the death of society
and, particularly, American society.

Remember that Parsons, in his articles of 1928 and 1929, began
by conducting an intellectual war on two fronts : against Marxism,
on the one hand, and its critics, Sombart and Weber, on the other.
And he opposes them all for much the same reasons, because they
are antagonists of capitalist society, and because they are all —
Sombart and Weber, as well — deeply pessimistic about it. Central
to Marxism, of course, was its “death prophecy” concerning cap-
italism; Marxism said that capitalism contained "the seeds of its
own destruction” and vowed that it would bury capitalism. At the
very source of Parsons’ whole intellectual effort, then, was an effort
to combat this death prophecy; to seek or formulate a social system
so general in character that it need never die; to endow it richly
with a perpetual, self-maintaining character; to remove or iron out
all hint of internal disruption and decay; and, finally, to cap it all
(as he does in his article "Evolutionary Universals”) with a
“proof” that it is not our system but theirs that will die. In effect.
Parsons’ proof of the self-equilibrating, self-maintaining character
of the “ social system” is akin to Plato’s “proof” of the immortality
of the soul. The immortality of man, however, is no longer vouch-
safed by the immortality of his soul but now, in Parsons, by the
immortality of his social system.

I have repeatedly insisted that it is of basic importance in under-
standing Parsons to remember that his theoretical system emerges
in the midst of the mounting crisis of Western societies, makes its
first serious appearance during the Great Depression, and develops
in a world in which, as Parsons conceives it, the United States is
confronted by the dangerous revolutionary power of the communist
system. 3 Parsons’ optimism, his very optimism concerning social
systems, is of a special sort. It is an optimism in the face of pes-
simism, an optimism that rejects and is against pessimism. Op-
timism need not be of that sort. It can simply be born of the
prospects, excitement, and enjoyment of life; it can express a sense
of the juices that run through one. Not so, Parsons’ optimism. His
is a determined optimism, a polemical optimism, an antipessimistic
optimism; his optimism is more like an atheist’s vigorous denial of
God than an agnostic’s unpolemical uncertainty. It is precisely be-
cause it has this overreactive component that it is ridden with a kind
of compulsiveness that is so one-sided, so little able to acknowledge
any serious difficulty in our society or to see any of its problems in
their full profundity.

From Plato to Parsons

435

THE VIABILITY OF THE FUNCTIONALIST
INFRACTRUCTURE

I have suggested that both Platonism and Functionalism are built
upon similar infrastructures, and both are plainly infused with
certain common sentiments, domain assumptions, values, images of
what man and society should be, and assumptions concerning what
they are. Their values center on an ethic of restraint and the nega-
tion of the private self; upon a concern that men do their duty but
without a corresponding concern for their gratification or for their
rights. Both are impregnated with some version of an ethic of
restraint, temperance, and decorousness. In both, expressive disci-
pline and impulse control are central values. They are based upon
a metaphysics of order and hierarchy, with the result that they set
small store on human love — which they see as a socially disruptive
force — but rather affirm the more temperate affection involved in
friendship. Both premise that the cementing social sentiments are
neither love, nor a sense of human fraternity or common human
destiny, but rather are esteem, prestige, and, above all, respect.
They are also suspicious of change and manifest a greater concern
for the claims of conformity and consensus — regarded as the more
important and valuable attributes of society — than for the claims
of liberty and equality.

There is, then, a common infrastructure of domain assumptions,
of sentiments, and of conceptions of the real that are shared by
both Functionalism and Platonism. The point of this observation is
not to deny that Functionalism is "new” or to claim that the central
features of Functionalism had long ago been "anticipated” by classi-
cal Platonism. If only in its scientific commitment, in its insistence
on the importance of empirical components of knowing, and in its
focus on what “is” rather than on what “should be,” Functionalism
is, indeed, by no means reducible to or identical with Platonism.
It is true that Functionalism has made many of the value concerns
that were central to Platonism equally central to its own models of
the social world; but it has placed these within the framework of a
concern with the empirical or existential that are primary to it, at
least in principle.

Our implication, therefore, is not that Functionalism in any
sense constitutes a “rew r orking” of Platonism in the framework of
an empirically oriented sociology. It is certainly not that Platonism
was a philosophical tradition which had first been known to and

436 The Coining Crisis of Western Sociolog)'

assimilated in technical detail by Functionalists and then applied to
a new set of problems or data, in the manner, say, that Hegelianism
had been by Marx. Both Platonism and Functionalism, rather,
simply rest on an infrastructure that has important common com-
ponents. The point is not that Platonism shaped Functionalism, but
that both have been influenced by underlying, historically perdur-
ing forces. In comparing Functionalism with Platonism, my central
concern has been to exhibit the communality of certain important
aspects of their infrastructure and, thereby, the antiquity of the
infrastructure which underlies Functionalism.

The antiquity of this infrastructure suggests its potency and its
continuing potentiality as a theory-shaping force. I do not, how-
ever, believe that this infrastructure is unchangeable or eternal.
Indeed, it may be that the great growth of modern industrialization,
which is a very recent development in the long-time perspective
that we are dealing with here, may well have established conditions
that have already started to undermine this infrastructure and may
do so increasingly, particularly as technological developments begin
to bring about a radical change in the fundamental problem of
scarcity and provide new mechanisms of social control. Yet even
though this infrastructure may be in the process of becoming
antiquated, and even though there may be a sense in which “its
days are numbered,” still I do not believe its day is already over.
Nor will it be in the immediate and foreseeable future. It seems
more probable that this infrastructure will continue to be repro-
duced, at least for some appreciable time, among privileged and
elite sectors of the population. It seems likely to continue, as it has
in the past, to serve as a theory-shaping influence and, thus, as a
force contributing to the persistence of social theories essentially
continuous with those that emerged in Positivism and later evolved
into modern Functionalism.

This does not mean that the Functional model will survive the
present crisis unchanged; nor does it mean that its present crisis
is not a grave one. The very sharpness of the present crisis and its
repercussions on Academic Sociology as a whole are, in part, a
consequence of the abiding resources that Functionalism can draw
upon, to resist the challenge of new theories that rest upon new or
different infrastructures and to resist other pressures toward theo-
retical change. My central conclusion, therefore, is that Function-
alism will not collapse in any radical manner, and that it will not
manifest anything like the rather abrupt discontinuity, say, that
"evolutionism” did during the third or Classical period in the de-
velopment of sociological theory.

I would also conclude, from the potency of the Functionalist
infrastructure, that the movement of theorists with prior Function-

From Plato to Parsons 437

alist commitments toward a Marxist model will be a limited one.
This movement toward convergence with Marxism will generate
increasing strains for those who had initially made Functionalist
commitments, because it is dissonant with the infrastructure they
are likely to embody. I would guess, then, that the movement by
older Functionalists toward a convergence with Marxism, while it
will go further than that manifested earlier by Durkheim and
others, will essentially entail an effort to assimilate Marxism into a
Functionalist technostructure and infrastructure. The convergence
effort then — when it is made by Functionalists — will not be made
from some neutral ground that is equally open to the claims and
impulses of both theoretical models. (Much the same is likely to be
true in similar efforts made by Marxists toward convergence with
Functionalism.) This, however, does not mean that sociological
models unambivalently or fully committed to Marxism will not
become increasingly important in Academic Sociology. It suggests,
rather, than one ought to expect these to be developed by younger
people and by those who have not been committed to Functional-
ism previously, and who embody infrastructures different from
those characteristic of Functionalism.

THE POTENTIAL OF A RADICAL SOCIOLOGY

In emphasizing the power of the infrastructure on which Function-
alism rests, I do not mean to suggest the unchangeability of the
conservative character either of Functionalism or Academic Soci-
ology. My point, rather, has been to indicate why I think an im-
portant part of academic social theory will remain essentially
continuous with Functionalism and why, further, the changes in
Functionalism that one can expect are probably limited. My view is
that ah infrastructure conducive to a functional theory will persist
for the foreseeable future. At the same time, however, I expect it
to have a less commanding influence on Academic Sociology as a
whole, leaving increasing room for the development of social
theories of a less conservative character and, indeed, I expect that a
part of sociology will become increasingly radicalized. There will,
in short, be a growth of a “radical sociology” which, while never the
dominant perspective of Academic sociologists, will grow in influ-
ence, particularly among the younger, rising generation.

There are three basic factors on which the future of this radical

43§ The Coining Crisis of Western Sociology

potential in Academic Sociology will depend: (i) the changing
political praxis and, in particular, the growing efforts of some so-
ciologists, again, particularly the young, to actively change the
community and the university in more humane and democratic
directions; (2) the increasing interaction between Academic Soci-
ology and Marxism, particularly the more Hegelian versions of
Marxism; and (3) the inherent contradictions of Academic Sociol-
ogy itself which generate certain instabilities and open it to a
measure of change.

The growing political activism of sociologists, especially younger
ones, is partly evidenced by the increasing development of the
"radical caucus” in the American Sociological Association; by the
disproportionately large number of sociology students involved in
university reform movements; and by the prominence of sociologists
among those faculty members against whom career reprisals have
been made by the administrations of various universities. In addi-
tion to its value to the community and the university, the radical
political activity of such sociologists is significant because of its
self-transforming consequences for the persons involved. It can
activate a new structure of sentiments and generate a new experi-
ence with the world that can change the pretheoretical impulses
from which new, articulate sociologies emerge. The “radicalization”
that such political activism generates develops new infrastructures
conducive to new and better sociologies, and certainly to sociol-
ogies different from Functionalism.

Again, there is no question that throughout Academic Sociology
in the United States there is clear evidence that it is involved in a
growing dialogue of increasing intensity with various versions of
Marxism. Those who want to change the character of Academic
Sociology and accelerate the development of a radical sociology will
promote such a dialogue even where they themselves are far from
satisfied \\ath the intellectual or political adequacy of classical Marx-
ism. The theoretical effect of such increased interaction between
Academic Sociology and Marxism will not and cannot be one-sided. It
will not simply be Academic Sociology that is transformed in the
process but also Marxism itself. Such radical potential as Academic
Sociology possesses, then, will not be brought about in isolation
from Marxism but will be furthered as interaction with it grows.
Both Marxism and Academic Sociology need one another for their
mutual continued development. To the degree that such interaction
grows, the basic structural cleavage in world social theory between
Academic Sociology and Marxism, a cleavage that has persisted
since the nineteenth century, will move to a new historical level
and, partly through the struggle between these viewpoints, it may

From Plato to Parsons

439

be that a new theoretical synthesis (not simply a compromise) is
being developed.

Finally, the potentialities of a radical sociology will also be in-
fluenced by the existence of certain contradictions inherent in
Academic Sociology, to which I have referred at various points
earlier in this volume. It is, therefore, useful to review briefly cer-
tain of these contradictions.

One of the central contradictions of modern sociology, especially
in the United States, derives from its role as market researcher for
the Welfare State. This role exposes sociologists to two contradic-
tory, even if not equally powerful, experiences: on one side, it
limits the sociologist to the reformist solutions of the Welfare State;
but, on the other, it exposes him to the failures of this state and of
the society with whose problems it seeks to cope. Such Academic
Sociologists have a vested interest in the very failures of this society
— in a real sense their careers depend upon it; but at the same
time their very work makes them intimately familiar with the
human suffering engendered by these failures. Even if it is the
special business of such sociologists to help clean up the vomit of
modern society, they are also sometimes revolted by what they see.
Thus the sociologists’ funding tie to the Welfare State does not
produce an unambivalent loyalty to it or to the social system it
seeks to maintain. To be “bought” and to be “paid for” are two
different things — and that is a contradiction of the Welfare State
not peculiar to its relations with sociologists.

A similar contradiction is involved in the call for “objectivity” so
central to the methodological canons of Academic Sociology. For
while a belief in objectivity fosters the sociologists’ accommodation
to the way things are, it also fosters and expresses a certain amount
of distance from the society’s dominant values. The sociologist’s
claim to objectivity is not simply a disguise for his devotion or
capitulation to the status quo, nor is it an expression of a true
neutrality toward it. For some sociologists the claim to objectivity
serves as a facade for their own alienation from and resentment
toward a society whose elites, even today, basically treat them as
the Romans treated their Greek slaves: as skilled servants, useful
but lower beings.

The call for “objectivity” serves as a "sacred” justification to
withhold the reflexive loyalty that society demands, while at the
same time providing a protective covering for the critical impulses
of the timid. Under the protection of his claim to objectivity, the
sociologist sometimes engages in a bitchy and carping, tacit and
partial unmasking of society’s failures. Challenged, the sociologist
can always scamper back behind the parapet of his “objectivity,”

440 The Coining Crisis of Western Sociology

claiming that it is not really he who has pronounced a judgment
on society, but that it is the impersonal facts that have spoken.
In its present, historically developed form, as a claim of the con-
temporary professional social sciences, “objectivity” is largely the
ambivalent ideology of those whose resentment is shackled by their
timidity and privilege. Behind objectivity there is a measure of
alienation.

One of the most basic contradictions of Academic Sociolog)' re-
sides in the domain assumptions intrinsic to the sociological per-
spective. This is the contradiction betweeen sociology’s focal as-
sumption that society makes man, and its tacit assumption that
man makes society. The former assumption is focal, in some
measure, because it is in the interest of Academic Sociology to
emphasize the manner in which society, groups, social relations,
social positions, and culture shape and infuse men. While this as-
sumption, that society and culture shape men, served at one point
to liberate men from biological or supernatural conceptions of their
destiny, it becomes an increasingly repressive metaphysics in a
more fully secularized and bureaucratized society such as our own,
particularly when it encourages a view of social forces as an inde-
pendent social reality, apart and autonomous from men’s actions.
If this assumption began by encouraging a liberation of men from
their position as the puppets of God and biology, it came to entail a
vision of them as the passive raw materials of society and culture,
inviting them to bow the knee in gratitude toward a “society” upon
which, they are told, nothing less than their very humanness de-
pends.

There is an important truth in this vision of society as an
autonomous force. It reflects the despair of secularized men who,
told that it was they who made the world, nonetheless found that
this world was out of their control and was not really theirs. But
the trouble is that the sociologist’s conception of society and social
forces as autonomous tacitly takes this alienated condition as nor-
mal and inevitable, rather than as a pathological condition to be
fought and surmounted, an effort that finds support in the view
that it is men who do indeed make society.

These central domain assumptions of sociology and their struc-
ture — that is, the present dominance of the belief that social forces
shape men, and the subordination of the assumption that men
make society — not only reflect the larger alienation of industrial
societies since the French Revolution, but they are also rooted in
and confirmed by the special experience of academicians, particu-
larly their political impotence in the university and their docility
toward its authorities.

For tenured faculty, the university is a realm of congenial and

From Plato to Parsons 441

leisured servitude. It is a realm in which the academician is
esteemed for his learning but castrated as a political being. Indeed,
it is this trade-off, in which the academician has the right to be a
tiger in the classroom but the need to be a pussycat in the Dean’s
office, that contributes so much to the irrational posturings and
theatrics of the classroom. Like other academics, the Academic
Sociologist learns from the routine experience of his dependency
within the university that he can strike terror only in the hearts of
the very young — and now they want to strip him of even that
privilege — but that he himself is the gelded servant of the very
system in which he is, presumably, the vaunted star. He has thus
learned with an intuitive conviction that “society shapes men” be-
cause he lives it every' day; it is his autobiography objectified.

It is precisely here that the praxis of the radical sociologist has
its greatest intellectual potentiality for, through it, he learns and
teaches a different set of assumptions : that men can resist success-
fully; that they are not simply the raw materials of social systems;
that they can be the shakers and makers of worlds that are and
worlds that might be. It is such praxis that can help transcend
the contradictions of sociology and release its liberative side. No
“sociologist” has ever written a single sentence; no sociologist has
ever done a single research or had a single idea; it is the entire man
w'ho makes sociolog)'. Those who are whole men, or struggle
against their incompleteness, will make a very different sociology
than will those who passively accept the crippling that their worlds
have inflicted upon them.

In its political and ideological character, then. Academic Sociol-
ogy is an ambivalent structure which has both liberative and re-
pressive sides. Although its conservative-repressive dimension dom-
inates it. Academic Sociolog)' is not unequivocally such. To miss
this is to miss the opportunity and the task. To miss this is also to
increase the danger of fostering a primitivistic regression to an
orthodox (if not vulgar) Marxism, and to encourage a mindless
know'-nothingism content to delude itself into believing that Aca-
demic Sociolog)’ has accomplished absolutely nothing at all in the
last thirty years, thereby inhibiting its use as one important stimu-
lus for a continuing development of Marxism itself.

To repeat, there are powerful contradictions within sociolog)'
which provide leverage for the transformation of sociolog)’ itself.
These suggest that radicals are not justified in viewing sociology in
the w'ay that Rome looked upon Carthage. Just as Marx extricated
the liberative potentialities of a Hegelianism which w r as previously
dominated by its conservative aspect and delivered from it a left or
neo-Hegelianism, so, too, is it possible to transcend contemporary
Academic Sociology and to deliver from it a radical or neo-sociology.

442 The Coining Crisis of Western Sociology

Because of these contradictions, Academic Sociology, even with
its profoundly conservative structure, still retains politically lib-
erative potentialities that can be useful in transforming the com-
munity. While there is no doubt that Academic Sociology has
neglected the importance of power, property, conflict, force, and
fraud, it has (not despite, but because of this) focused attention
on some of the new sources and sites of social change in the
modem social world.

For example, to be provocatively invidious about it, it was not
Marxism but Talcott Parsons and other Functionalists who noticed
early the importance of the emerging “youth culture” and at least
lifted it out as an object for attention. It was the Academic Sociolo-
gists, not the Marxists in the United States, who helped many to
get their first concrete picture of how Blacks and other subjugated
groups live, and who contributed to such practical political develop-
ments as the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision of 1954. It is
the ethnography of conventional Academic Sociologists which has
also given us the best picture of the emerging psychedelic and drug
cultures.

Again, it was Max Weber and other Academic Sociologists who
forced us to confront the problem of bureaucracy in the modem
world in all of its profundity and pervasiveness. Unlike many
Marxists, the Academic Sociologists refused to confine their view
of bureaucracy to the state levels alone; they did not view it as a
social epiphenomenon that would automatically be overcome with
the achievement of socialism, as Karl Kautsky did; and, unlike
certain Soviet scholars, they did not view bureaucracy as some kind
of social “vestige” possessed of an unexplained viability in the con-
temporary world.

It is precisely because so much of Academic Sociology is polem-
ically and compulsively anti-Marxist and anti-socialist that it was
led to explore parts of the social world ignored by the Marxists and
to focus on, and often exaggerate, every new social development
that meant bad news for Marxism. Indeed, Academic Sociology has
often provided a systematic awareness of those very social proc-
esses which, because they were lacking in the awareness of Marx-
ists, have contributed to the latter’s failures. That Academic Sociol-
ogy has commonly been animated by politically inspired motives
does not necessarily vitiate the fact that it has often explored
hitherto unknown social worlds, and that what it has found is often
usable in transforming the modem world.

The task, then, is not simply to denounce Academic Sociology,
but also to understand that it contains viable elements and liber-
ative potentialities. The problem is to crack these out of the con-
servative ideological structure in which they are embedded, to

From Plato to Parsons 443

rework them thoroughly, and to assimilate them in a social theory
which is not limited and confined to the assumptions of our present
society. The problem is not only to denounce Academic Sociology
but also to transcend and sublate it.

A NOTE ON THE FUTURE. OF SOCIOLOGY

It should be clear then, that I have not meant to suggest that the
crisis in Academic Sociology will be resolved by a return to the
status quo ante, or that there will be no major changes in its larger
structure. Far from it. First, as I have suggested, I see a continuing
movement of Functionalism (of what is even now beginning to be
called “classical” or “static” Functionalism by certain Functionalists
themselves) toward a convergence with Marxism; but what I have
said above means, in effect, that this drift will stop a good deal
short of a full blending with, let alone a surrender to, Marxism. It
will be an assimilation accommodative to the infrastructure of
Functionalism discussed here. My conjecture is that the equilibrium
point in this development, that is, the point at which it will stop
moving toward Marxism, will be a kind of “Keynesian” Functional-
ism, which gives special weight to the role of the government and
the political process, and which will be pervaded by a more instru-
mental mood.

At the same time, however, I also expect, as I have indicated,
that there will be increased development of a more distinctly
Marxist and radical sociology that will have an autonomous base
in the emerging generation of younger sociologists, even though
they will not be the only ones contributing to it. The hard social
core of this development, then, will not consist of defecting Func-
tionalists but of those who were never committed to Functionalism
in the first place, who were largely trained in the period after
Functionalism came under mounting theoretical attack, and who
were congenial to and experienced the emergence of the New Left.

In effect, the movement toward more Keynesian and Marxian
views signals a transformation of the total structure of academic
sociological perspectives; it will not simply be an addition to an
essentially unchanged structure. It means that the range or spread
of the ideological perspective of Academic Sociology will be greatly
extended. In particular, it means that there will be something that
has hardly ever before existed, particularly in American Academic

444 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

Sociology, namely, a “left” that will openly accept Marx and Marxist
works as theoretical paradigms. There wall emerge, both by reason
of the Keynesian drift in Functionalism and by reason of the de-
velopment of a separate Marxian Sociology, a general shift to the
left in the community of Academic Sociologists. That the New
Marxists and the New Leftists will not view even the Keynesian
Functionalists with much greater regard than they have the "classi-
cal” Functionalists — in short, that they will continue to view them
as conservative — should not obscure the fact that the intellectual
structure of Academic Sociology itself wall have, nonetheless, under-
gone a major reorganization.

So far as theoretical and intellectual perspectives are concerned,
certain other developments may be expected. Among these, one
may expect a continued interest in Goffman’s dramaturgical stand-
point, and other perspectives allied with it, such as Howard
Becker’s work on deviance, which constitute a new' stage in the
development of the “Chicago School.” Along with Garfinkel’s eth-
nomethodology, these promise to resonate the sentiments and as-
sumptions of some young people oriented to the new Psychedelic
Culture, and perhaps even of some of the New' Left. It should be
expected that these standpoints will continue to win support from
sections of the younger generation.

While George Homans’ standpoint is imbued w'ith a much less
romantic perspective than Goffman’s and is disposed toward a
rather different, a more “high science” methodology than those de-
riving from the Chicago tradition, there are, nonetheless, certain
points of affinity among all of them. For one, they share a common
focus upon “small groups” research. More important, how'ever, they
are all commonly nonhistorical in their perspectives; the w'orld with
which they attempt to deal is a w'orld outside history. Partly for this
reason, they are rather sharply differentiated from the emerging
Marxian sociology which is, of course, traditionally historical in per-
spective. Nonetheless, I suspect that, faced with a choice between
neo-Marxists and neo-Functionalists, some in this new group,
particularly those with a Chicago heritage, may find the Marxists
closer to their own alienated dispositions and share with them an
amorphous sympathy with underdogs and victims.

With respect to its theoretical and intellectual dispositions, then,
as well as with regard to its ideological ramifications, the structure
of Academic Sociology' promises to become much more polycentric
than it has been. It will, also, become more ideologically resonant
than it has been. But one may conjecture that there will increas-
ingly emerge a tensionful polarization between this development
and the growth of an instrumental orientation. This growing in-
strumentalism, accelerated by the increasing role of the state, finds

From Plato to Parsons

445

its expression in "theoryless” theories, a kind of methodological
empiricism in which there is a neglect of substantive concepts
and assumptions concerning specifically human behavior and social
relations, and a corresponding emphasis upon seemingly neutral
methods, mathematical models, investigational techniques, and
research technologies of all kinds. Among the most notable in-
stances of this are operations research, cybernetics, general systems
theory, and even operant conditioning. Indeed, Parsons himself has
already manifested certain inclinations toward a kind of general
systems theory.

Such a conceptually uncommitted and empty methodological
empiricism is particularly well adapted to service the research
needs of the Welfare State. This is so, in part, for precisely the
reason that Comte anticipated, namely, that their “hard” method-
ologies function as a rhetoric of persuasion. They communicate an
image of a “scientific” neutrality and thereby presumably provide
a basis for political consensus concerning government programs.
Furthermore, their conceptual emptiness allows their researches to
be formulated in terms that focus direcdy on those problems and
variables of administrative interest to government sponsors. They
thus avoid any conflict between the applied interests of their gov-
ernment sponsors and the technical interests of a theoretically
guided tradition. In effect, the methodological empiricists are in-
creasingly becoming the market researchers of the Welfare State.

These theoretical changes and developments in Academic Soci-
ology will be occurring in a society in which a Welfare State has
been institutionalized and exerts great pressure on the social sci-
ences, especially through funding and other resources. The Welfare
State will continue to influence the Functionalists, and it will
strongly support methodological empiricism. It will also influence
studies carried on in the Chicago tradition, exerting pressure on it
to focus its alienated component on the unmasking of the low level
administrators in charge of “caretaking” operations in local com-
munities, and thus facilitate their subjection to control from the
administrative center at the national level . 4 Nor is there the slight-
est reason to suppose that the Marxists themselves will be exempt
from the blandishments and pressures of the Welfare State. It is
likely that many will, in the end, become “Marxists of the chair.”
Some who began by denouncing “consensus” theories in favor of
“conflict” theories will “transcend” this Hegelian thesis-antithesis
with a new dialectical “synthesis” calling for “cooperation.” One
should not be surprised to find erstwhile “conflict” theorists, such
as Irving Louis Horowitz, capitulating completely to Parsonsianism
and solemnly announcing, ‘Indeed the drive of a social system is
toward structure and ultimately toward the maintenance of order .” 5

446 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

And there will also be increasingly fine distinctions made by
Marxists and other sociologists, about which government agencies
it is permissible to ask money from, some feeling that the Depart-
ment of Defense is tainted but that the State Department’s money is
clean. In short, all schools of sociology will face the common prob-
lem of eluding the confining perspectives of the Welfare State,
though some will do so more than will others.

NOTES

x. I have outlined my views on the nature and origins of Plato’s social
theory at some length in A. W. Gouldner, Enter Plato (New York: Basic
Books, 1965), particularly in Part II. Here, of course, I can only sketch them
briefly. I indicated in Enter Plato that this study was undertaken not out of
antiquarian interest but precisely to help diagnose the present condition of
social theory.

2. T. Parsons, "Religious Perspectives of College Teaching in Sociology
and Social Psychology,” in A. W. and H. P. Gouldner et al.. Modem Sociology
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 488.

3. One might add that Plato’s thought also is environed by a similar
threat, but one which has already culminated: by the climactic experience
of Athens’ defeat by Sparta, by the destruction of the Athenian empire, by
the later defeat of Sparta herself, and with this, the destruction of the
Hellenic citadel of traditionalism, which could then no longer provide either
a living embodiment of the aristocratic oligarch’s aspirations or a safe
political refuge.

4 - For a fuller discussion, see my “Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and
the Welfare State,” The American Sociologist (August 1968).

5. I. L. Horowitz, "Radicalism and Contemporary' American Society,” p.
569, S. E. Deutsch and J. Howard, Where It’s At, Radical Perspectives in
Sociology (New York: Harper 8: Row, 1970).

CHAPTER

Notes on the Crisis of Marxism
and the Emergence of Academic
Sociology in the Soviet Union i

Though Functionalism in the United States is involved in a crisis,
its world career is far from at an end. Indeed, the career of Func-
tionalism, and of Academic Sociology more broadly, is now just
beginning in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. Both are
becoming increasingly attractive to intellectuals in the Soviet Bloc
of nations. Even as the American reaction to the work of Talcott
Parsons seems to be increasingly critical or apathetic, there is a
growing interest in it among European scholars, both Marxist and
non-Marxist alike.

I have suggested earlier, in Chapter 4, that world sociology
underwent a binary fission; one “half" of it became Academic
Sociology, in which the Functionalist tradition finally became the
dominant theoretical synthesis, while the other "half" of world
sociology became Marxist. Until after World War II each tradition
was greatly isolated from, not to say contemptuous of, the other.
This changed radically, however, after World War II and especially
after the “thaw” in the Cold War, when there was renewed inter-
action between the two traditions.

It would be overstating it, however, were I to suggest that, prior
to that time, both traditions developed in total isolation and with-
out any mutual influence. Indeed, much of the history of Academic
Sociology during the Classical or third period is unintelligible ex-
cept as a response to and a polemic against Marxism. Had there
been no Marx, the emphases and character of the work of Max
Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto would have been
vastly different. Moreover, Marxism and Functionalism did exert

447

448 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

mutual influence and pressure upon one another well before World
War II. If, as seems to be the case, Marxism influenced Function-
alism more than vice versa, it was largely so because Functionalism
was still continuing to develop long after World War I, while the
intellectual development of Marxism was blighted as Stalinism
strengthened its hold on the Soviet Union.

One most interesting, early indication of the influence of con-
ventional Academic Sociology on Soviet Marxism may be found in
the work of Nicolai Bukharin, who was fully familiar with most of
the great sociologists of the Classical period. It appears that
Bukharin was working his way toward a formally developed and
generalized social “system” model of analysis. 1 An important ex-
pression of Marxist influence on work of a specifically Function-
alist character, although characteristically unacknowledged, may
be found in the theory of the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski. The Marxist influence — particularly of some on its
highest level domain assumptions — on the theory of Robert K.
Merton is also notable and significant. 2 In general, however, Marx-
ist influence seems decidedly stronger in anthropology than in
sociology. This may be due to the far greater interest that anthro-
pologists traditionally have in the “material” conditions of life, in
artifactual, biological, and even evolutionary concerns, as well as
to anthropology’s being a far more “romantic” discipline than
sociology, resonating more congenially to the more romantic do-
main assumptions of Marxism. (While I cannot develop it here, it
should at least be clear at this point that I do not in the least regard
the “romantic” as intrinsically "conservative” or “reactionary” and
do not use the terms in a dyslogistic way.)

The influence of Marxism on Functionalism was, until recently,
rather difficult to see or document, for it was usually unfootnoted
and unacknowledged. It was, nonetheless, often a part of Func-
tionalism’s viable culture and, as such, more visible to those who
actually participated in it on that level than to those who had to
rely on the record deposited in publications. Marxism’s influence
on Functionalism is part of the still unwritten history of the Func-
tional Sociology that developed in a middle-class society where
Marxism was politically anathema, where the taint of Marxism
could cripple academic careers, where Marxism was often dismissed
out of hand as an outdated theory or as a mere ideology or, as a
“religion” by those same people who otherwise professed to a re-
spect for religion. In such circumstances, some Functionalists
found the use of Marxism so inexpedient and dangerous that they
repressed their own awareness of their own actual reliance upon it,
so that they would not feel anxious about using it, and, at least,
simply screened out its open manifestations so they would not be

Crisis of Marxism ami Academic Sociology 449

subject to reprisals. If this conception of the matter seems dis-
crepant with the self-image that academic scholars in the West
have of their own intellectual autonomy and moral courage, those
who lived through (and still allow themselves to remember) the
impact of the McCarthy repression will know that it is not over-
drawn: if generals and senators were intimidated, so too were pro-
fessors. Thus some Functionalists borrowed from Marxism, but
discreetly or somnambulistically.

Still, tin's borrowing was only a part of the deviant "under-
culture” of Functionalism and not its dominant public posture.
The dominant situation was one of relatively great mutual isola-
tion, of polemical criticism, and of often unalloyed ignorance be-
tween the Functionalist and Marxist traditions. (The relationship
between diehard Sociological Positivism and Marxism was even
more strained.) The Functionalists missed the point that Marxism
filled a void to which they themselves had, by their own one-
sidedness, contributed. Focusing on the manner in which societies
maintain themselves spontaneously, Functionalists were not pre-
pared for the development of the Welfare State and for the day
when they would be called upon to provide tangible aid to facilitate
state control of domestic and international problems. The Marxists,
for their part, could not imagine that they too would one day have
need of a social science that specialized in the study of social order
and consensus. Escalating Lenin’s rhetoric about the "lapdogs of
imperialism,” certain Soviet Marxists saw no humor in berating
graying academicians in small midwestem colleges as the "sharks
of imperialism.”

If I have not misread the signs, there is a basic shift impending
on both sides of this great historical division. As I have said, some
Functionalists have in recent times manifested a clear and open
drift toward Marxism. Correspondingly, many Marxists, in the
Soviet Bloc as elsewhere, manifest a growing attraction to Aca-
demic Sociology, including Functionalism and even Parsons him-
self. The Functionalist heirs of the Positivist tradition and the
adherents of Marxism are moving now, each toward the other,
cautiously and tentatively, to be sure, but moving, nonetheless.
Each side is now less concerned than before with merely polemiciz-
ing against the other and is more deeply involved in attempting to
learn about the other’s position in its full complexity. 3

As a result, world sociology is now closer than ever before to
transcending the schism with which it has lived for more than a
century. To say that this potentiality is now greater than ever is,
however, very far from saying that it is something that will happen
tomorrow. Moreover, while all men of good will cherish a vision of
human unity and desire the decline of all factors that contribute to

450 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

mutual antipathy between the two greatest powers of the modem
world, still it must not automatically be supposed that, even were
this theoretical rapprochement to be consummated, it would un-
equivocally be “good” for human welfare. The meaning and con-
sequences of such a rapprochement would depend on the basis on
which it comes to rest, on the uses to which it is put, and on the
needs and values it serves. I shall return to this question at a later
point.

The movement of Soviet Marxists toward an increased apprecia-
tion of Academic Sociology is certainly consistent with the funda-
mental assumption of Marx and Engels that their own theory, and
working-class culture more generally, must and should assimilate
the best in bourgeois thought. But the modern interest in Academic
Sociology by Soviet Marxists cannot, of course, be explained as a
result of this assumption, precisely because it is a relatively new
turn. Moreover, I do not believe that this turn to Academic Sociol-
ogy is attributable to a belief that a theoretical retooling of Marxism
is necessary to manage its intellectual difficulty in dealing with the
new social structures and problems — the rise of the “new” middle
class, or the separation of management and ownership, for instance
— that have appeared since the emergence of Marxism, or because
these are regarded as disconfirming the expectations and predic-
tions of Marx. The difficulties of the Marxian thesis concerning
the “increasing misery” of the proletariat, or of the thesis about the
polarization between capital and labor — these and many other
problems were long familiar to Marxists. This “disconfirming” evi-
dence, then, cannot account for the modem interest of Soviet
Marxists in Academic Sociology, any more than the recent shift in
Parsonsianism toward Marxism may be explained as a result of its
own empirical difficulties or its failure to be supported by the facts.
This shift is an expression, rather, of a crisis in Marxism which
parallels that in Functionalism and, in large part, derives from the
conflicts and problems of Soviet society itself.

Among the various contemporary expressions of this crisis in
world Marxism is the growing variety of neo-Marxisms. This is, in
part, indicated by increased interest among independent Marxists
living in the West in the earlier contributions of Georg Lukacs and
Antonio Gramsci; and by the strongly Hegelian work of the Frank-
furt School, including Herbert Marcuse, which is accepted by cer-
tain- Marxists as a contribution to the development of Marxism
itself; and by the anti-Hegelian w'ork of communists such as the
French philosopher Louis Althusser, 4 who are strongly attracted to
the “structuralism” of Claude Levi-Strauss and who, like other
Marxists working in France (for instance, Nicos Poulantzas 5 ) are
fully abreast of developments in Academic Sociology, including the

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology 451

•work of Parsons; and the differences between Althusser and cer-
tain other French Marxist philosophers, such as the more human-
istic Roger GaraudyA Along similar lines, expressing the growing
differentiation in Marxism, is the pronounced emph asi s by cer tain
Poles and Yugoslavians on the humanistic dimension in Marx. 7
Very closely related to such interests is the continued emphasis on
the importance of the young Marx, which is as pronounced among
younger men throughout Western Europe as it is in the United
States. This commonly entails a focus upon alienation, which
comes to be viewed increasingly not only as a phenomenon of
capitalism but as a more pervasive pathology, and one which may
be found, as Adam SchafFA the Polish communist philosopher, has
argued, even within socialist society. This growing variability in
Marxism, then, is expressed not only by nonafnliated Marxists but
also by those affiliated with various communist parties, sometimes
on high leadership levels, and by those within the Soviet Bloc of
nations as well as outside it. The implications of this growing
variety of interpretations of Marxism have been well expressed by
Norman Bimbaum, who has remarked:

The question is, how much further can Marxism be opened without
itself undergoing a radical transformation. ... It may be. however, that
those sociologists most aware of their debt to the Marxist tradition will
have to transform and transcend it; if so, the crisis in Marxist sociol-
ogy may mark the beginning of the end of Marxism. 5

One important factor underlying this growing differentiation in
interpretations of Marxism is the diversity of the national experi-
ences and interests of Marxists in various cultures. Where, as in
China. Cuba, and Yugoslavia, they came to power largely by their
own revolutionary efforts, with little or no Soviet aid. this is com-
monly taken as a basis for theorizing that is independent of and
divergent from the Soviet model. Also underlying the crisis of
Marxism was the blunting of its own “critical" impulse after it
became the official theorv and ideology of the Soviet State and of
the mass communist parties of Western Europe. While Marxism
remains a basis for a critique of the bourgeois world, its capacity
to serve as a basis for a critique of communist stale apparatuses,
societies, and movements was impaired, particularly as it came
under the control of the party apparatus, who often used it more to
legitimate policies than to arrive at them. With the communist
seizure of state power in Eastern Europe and the growing en-
trenchment of comm unis t parties in Western Europe, Marxism
found itself in a totallv different position than when it had first
been seeking to establish a political foothold.

Seeking to protect its own society from the uncertain outcomes

452 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

of international tensions, the Soviet State has inhibited socialist
movements elsewhere from risking revolutionary lunges to power
that might, it fears, provoke international conflagrations into which
it could be drawn; and it has come to rely upon its own military
power rather than on support from revolutionary groups elsewhere.
The Soviet State now does not believe that war with the West is
inevitable. This impulse toward an accommodation between the
Soviet Union and die West, no less than the Soviet Union’s in-
ternal need for the stabilization of its own society, has been con-
ducive to an academization of Marxism that dulls its critical and
revolutionary edge. Similarly, as the mass communist parties of
Italy and France become firmly established in their own societies,
they also become increasingly committed to a search for power
through parliamentary means; they seek to ally themselves with,
placate, or neutralize other forces in their society to further this
objective. Thus one finds a continuing and growing dialogue be-
tween Western Marxists and theologians, and a correspondingly
greater readiness of Marxists to be less critical of religion and to
see it as something more complex than “the opium of the people.”
Viewed from the standpoint of some young revolutionaries in
Western Europe, Marxism — particularly in its Soviet manifestation
— often seems an increasingly conservative force, either dampen-
ing their own revolutionary elan, or, in Cohn-Bendit’s term, simply
an “obsolete” thing. At the same time, however, Soviet Marxism-
Leninism still does not provide Soviet leaders, managers, and ad-
ministrators with the concrete kind of instrumental technology
that they increasingly seek to further their governance and to help
them in equilibrating their society. In short, both the conservative
and revolutionary wings of the communist movement today are
often seriously dissatisfied with the present state of Marxism-
Leninism.

THE CRISIS OF SOVIET MARXISM:
THE LINGUISTICS CONTROVERSY

The emerging crisis of Soviet Marxism was clearly evident well
before the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and, in-
deed, was quite visible even during Stalinism. One of the most
interesting expressions of this was, I believe, initiated by Stalin
himself, in 1950, in the guise of a discussion of certain technical

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology 453

problems of linguistics. 1 " This took the form of a critique of the
views that a Soviet linguist, N, Y. Marr, by then dead, had earlier
advanced about the nature of language.

Marr had been confronted with the problem of where to locate
language in tire Marxian framework: Was it a part of the economic-
production "foundation” or a part of the ideological and social
“superstructure”? Since there was little in Marx that would allow
language to be characterized as part of the economic foundation.
Marr quite naturally opted for the superstructure, in any case a
residual concept of sprawling looseness. Stalin, however, firmlv
denied this, arguing that, if language were part of the super-
structure, then, like other such elements, it should have changed
with the shifts in the Russian economic foundation from feudalism
to capitalism to socialism. Yet, it is apparent, he says, that “the
Russian language has remained essentially what it was before the
October Revolution.” Well, he was asked, is language part of the
economic foundation? No, it is not, according to Stalin. In despera-
tion he was then asked. Is language an intermediary phenomenon,
located midway between the economic base and the social super-
structure? No, says Stalin, it is not. Stalin’s position, in effect,
added a third general category to the traditional Marxist distinction
between infrastructure and superstructure, and this was accepted
by Soviet scholars. This third category includes social phenomenon,
such as language — which in an interesting convergence with Par-
sons is a "prerequisite” of social development — as well as mathe-
matics, symbolic logic, and the facts (as opposed to the interpreta-
tions) of science. These, it seems, are now regarded as independent
of tire economic infrastructure and do not vary with changes in it.”

It is clear that this issue was not half so important in its specific
implications for language as in its general consequences for classi-
cal Marxism as a theoretical system. Classical Marxism had
dichotomized the world of social phenomena, holding that every-
thing in it was either part of the economic infrastructure or of the
social superstructure. What Stalin was, in effect, doing was ac-
knowledging that this conceptual dichotomy so central to Marxism
was unworkable. The position he took had inevitably to create pres,
sure for a more general and drastic overhauling of Marxism, and
not merely of its peripheral elements but of its very fundamentals.

Some of the reasons for this theoretical shift can be "leaned
from Stalin's discussion of the “class” character of language. Like
an orthodox Marxist, Marr had held that language was influenced
by the system of social classes within the society in which it existed.
Language, however, answered Stalin, is not a class phenomenon
but is essentially a “national" thing. Here, as elsewhere, let rr.e
stress that I am not concerned with whether Stalin was empirically

The Coming; Crisis of Western Sociology

correct in what he said about language. What I am interested in
are the implications of his position for Marxism as a general theory.
Here, again, these seem clear. In this case, they involve a turn
from the traditional Marxist emphasis on the significance of class
phenomena to a greater emphasis on the autonomy of language
and its national character, which had previously taken a secondary
place in classical Marxist theory.

Marr had also believed that language, like other social phe-
nomena, changed and sometimes changed with sudden rapidity.
As a Marxist, Marr had held that social phenomena, language in-
cluded, could develop with sudden revolutionary' leaps and bounds.
“Marxism,” however, replied Stalin, “does not recognize sudden
explosions in the development of languages, the sudden death of an
existing language and the sudden creation of a new language.”
Here, once more, Stalin went out of his way to declare that estab-
lished Marxist domain assumptions, in this case those concerning
the potentially sudden character of great changes, are inapplicable.

It seems clear from this that classical Marxism, essentially a
change-oriented, revolutionary, and crisis-sensitive sociology', was
not merely becoming intellectually troublesome to the Soviet rulers,
but that, in certain ways, Stalin was beginning to regard it as
politically dangerous. Stalin makes this evident when he adds that
the Marxist theory of sudden change is no longer generally ap-
plicable to Soviet society.

It should be said in general for the benefit of comrades who have an
infatuation for such explosions that the law of transition from an old
quality to a new by means of an explosion is inapplicable not only to
the history of languages: It is not always applicable to some other
social phenomena of a basal or superstructural character. It is com-
pulsory for a society divided into hostile classes. But it is not compul-
sory for a society which has no hostile classes.

By which, of course, he meant the Soviet Union.

Well before the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union’s Communist
Party, then, the “Marr Controversy” had already made it plain that
the critical, change-oriented, and revolutionary character of Marx-
ism was discomfiting to some Soviet political leaders; that sectors
of the Soviet leadership were disposed to pay greater attention to
societally integrating forces such as language, or to "natural” foci
of social organization such as nationality and ethnicity, and thereby
to place greater emphasis upon gradual rather than sudden change.
In particular, the Marr Controversy indicated that the dichoto-
mous, hierarchical view of social reality, so intrinsic to Marxism,
was under pressure. The Marr Controversy thus indicated, on the
one side, that the most essential characteristics of Marxism itself

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology 455

were beginning to be experienced as dissonant with the new needs
of the Soviet State; on the other side, it also revealed some of the
specific assumptions around which a different and more congenial
social theory, very much akin to Functionalism, would be likely to
develop. The need for a sociology oriented to the problem of inte-
grating society was thus already manifest in Soviet society well
before the thaw inspired by the 20th Congress of its Communist
Party, though it became fully manifest only after that Congress.

FUNCTIONALISM GOES EAST

A systematic analysis of the diverse symptoms and sources of the
emerging crisis of Marxism, in and out of the Soviet Bloc, is a task
well beyond the scope of the present study. It is a problem every bit
as complex and demanding as an analysis of the parallel crisis of
Academic Sociology. In the foregoing I have sought tentatively to
explore and to sketch only a very few of the dimensions of the
problem . 12 In what follows, I shall confine myself to one aspect of
the crisis of Soviet Marxism, namely, the emergence of Academic
Sociology in the Soviet Union itself, and I shall limit myself to
observations and conclusions about this that are based primarily,
though not exclusively, on my own personal observations in Eastern
Europe and my discussions with sociologists and other scholars
there.

Marxism was, at least in one major part, a theory of how to
change the world. It was the mirror image of the Comtianism from
which Functionalism developed, and it never centered its attention
on the problem of stabilizing society. Yet as East European nations
today begin to achieve heightened industrialization, they too seem
to manifest a need for a theory that focuses on the spontaneous
mechanisms conducive to social stability and order. Indeed, it ap-
pears that this is one reason for the emergence of “Liebermanism"
in the Soviet Union. Liebermanism is a theory of the spontaneous
or market-like mechanisms useful for maintaining economic
growth and stability. Liebermanism focuses on the “natural” and
spontaneous mechanisms of economic order; some version of Func-
tionalism is needed to provide sociological underpinning for its
economics.

For what it is worth, I might mention that I presented this thesis
— concerning the growing attractiveness of Functionalism to East-

456 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociolog)'

ern European sociologists — at a conference held by some of them,
at which it was a subject of discussions conducted in my absence.
The following comments were written by an Eastern European
sociologist concerning this discussion:

The idea that Functionalism has begun a victorious march to the
East was considered as a valid one. Some papers prepared for the con-
vention ... as well as some comments made there in discussion may
be taken as new evidence in this sense. A paper written by a [nationality
designation] sociologist was done in the best or the worst Parsonsian
terms, far more closer to Davis and Moore than to Tumin’s views. Of
course, there was and there is a disagreement whether this turn to Func-
tionalism is something to be welcomed in every respect.

The significance of Parsons’ equilibrium analysis for the Soviet
Bloc is that it is concerned, in the Comtian tradition, with the
manner in which social systems spontaneously maintain them-
selves and that it focuses on the internal conditions that contribute
to such spontaneous societal self -maintenance. The crux of Parsons’
importance here is in how he formulates the equilibrium problem;
he wants to know how it is self-governing, self-adjusting, self-
correcting, self-maintaining. His analysis is valuable not because it
tells us what actually happens, but because he focuses on how
social systems might be made more self-maintaining.

There is no question, in my mind, that many of the details and
many of the fundamental assumptions that Parsons advances in
attempting to solve the equilibrium problem are wrong. There is
also no question that Parsons has, nonetheless, developed an analy-
sis of this problem that goes well beyond that of his predecessors.
He has gone far in setting out elements that need to be considered
and in establishing firmer ground for continuing work on it. Any-
one concerned with this matter must and can use Parsons as a
point of departure and as a grindstone on which to sharpen his own
thought.

Parsons’ abiding focus on this problem is, at once, both the least
useful and the most promising of his contributions, for there are
some social systems in the world today that are primarily girded
for change, while others aim at stabilization. The underdeveloped
"third” world is not now fundamentally concerned with the social
problem of how to develop a self-maintaining equilibrium in its
social system. Its problem, rather, seems to be much better con-
ceived of as how to change, if not disrupt, its old social system, and
how to mobilize “starting mechanisms” to generate a new rate and
direction of development, so that it may enter the industrial “take-
off.” While even here there are important questions as to how self-
maintaining mechanisms can be built into this development, so

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology 457

that a benign cycle of continual development may occur, nonethe-
less, for many of these countries the central issue is how to break
out of their old social system and start a new one. To this extent,
Parsons’ focus on self-equilibrating social systems is, from their
standpoint, useless. It provides little guidance for the '‘take-off”
problem, and for the revolutionary transformations that will pre-
cede it.

At the same time, however, there are other major regions of the
world (most particularly, the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe) where,
within the last half century, old social systems have been replaced
and new ones developed. Here, the starting problem has been
solved and the industrial take-off achieved. With this achievement,
however, the ground is prepared for a shift to a more conservative
interest in maintaining what has been achieved and, with this, to a
growing interest in the kinds of self-regulating systems which
Parsons — as the culminating figure in the Comtian tradition — has
done most to develop. Parsonsianism and Functionalism are con-
genial to those who, like some in the Soviet Bloc, are more con-
cerned with the problem of stabilizing their society. Moreover, Par-
sonsian equilibrium analysis is probably most compatible with the
more liberal initiatives of these cultures; self-regulation in the
Soviet context means the relaxation of the massive centralized con-
trols which they had established. The irony is that Parsonsianism
may now have greater practical use in the very society which it
was developed in opposition to. No Hegelian could have asked for
more.

As the nations of the Soviet Bloc seek mechanisms to protect
themselves against a recrudescence of Stalinism, their intellectuals
increasingly stress the role of morality; they discuss “Marxism and
Ethics” and place great emphasis on the importance of the very
self-restraining moral norms that Functionalism has always
stressed. In my discussions with sociologists in Eastern Europe dur-
ing 1965 and 1966, the importance of ethics and moral values was
repeatedly emphasized. In my discussions with Soviet sociologists,
they also dwelt on the importance of strengthening what they
called '‘self-control” among Soviet citizens. There are, I was told,

difficulties in getting people to exert self-control. For example, we have
had legal studies of the Soviets. Our legal scholars tell us that we do
not need to be given new rights; the problem is to get people to use the
rights they were given twenty to thirty years ago. The same is true in
other spheres of life, in factories and elsewhere. A habit of waiting for
directives from the top has emerged in the past, from past situations, and
it is hard to change this habit, but we are trying. We are trying to extend
democracy in our country and, with this, a greater respect for the individ-
ual person.

458 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

Soviet sociologists, like those in Poland, generally emphasized
the importance of developing what they termed the “spiritual life”
of their countries. It is not merely the analytic uses, then, but the
very nature of Functionalism’s built-in morality that makes it
attractive to Eastern Europeans. As the Soviet Bloc strives toward
heightened industrialization, as it explores political and economic
decentralization, as it seeks to consolidate and to enjoy what it
has accomplished, and most important, as it encounters the “im-
patience” of its own younger generation, about whose restiveness
it is deeply concerned, it may very well turn increasingly toward
Functional theory, precisely because it is a conservative theory, a
theory of social order and restraint.

Relative to the political conditions prevailing in these countries,
however, Functionalism is not a conservative but a liberal theory
of social order, for, at least prior to its turn toward the Welfare
State, it has usually emphasized the importance of the spontaneous
and self-maintaining mechanisms of social control rather than of
state regulation and control. It might be added, however, that
Functionalism is a liberal position not only relative to -political
conditions in the Soviet Bloc, but also when compared with the
ideological implications of certain of even the newer social science
orientations there. In the discussions about “Liebermanism” in the
Soviet Union, it seems clear that certain groupings within the
social science community have, in fact, opposed its liber alizin g
potentialities, arguing that decentralized, spontaneous market
mechanisms may not be necessary to solve the problems of Soviet
planning. Specifically, some apparently hold that the problems of
centralized planning, even on the macroscopic national level, may
be managed successfully in the Soviet Union by developing new
computer facilities. It is thus quite clear that even the supposedly
neutral technologies of science, such as computerization, may have
an ideological disposition; specialists in them are sometimes moved
by vested interest in their own technology to support politically
centralized controls and oppose decentralization. (Something quite
similar may also be expected from "program budgeting” in Ameri-
can governmental administration; as Aaron Wildavsky remarks,
“As presently conceived, program budgeting contains an extreme
centralizing bias.”) 13

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology

459

ACADEMIC SOCIOLOGY IN THE SOVIET BLOC

The social theory of the Soviet Union and of the Soviet Bloc, then,
no less than that of the United States, is moving toward significant
change. While I cannot explore the Soviet side of this development
in any detail. I shall allow myself a few generalizations derived
from my observations and discussions in three Eastern European
countries — Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union itself — during
1965 and 1966.

1. It seems indisputable that there is a growing and increasingly
autonomous body of distinctly sociological theory and research
within these countries. This is not a revival or reactivation of
Marxism. Institutionally and intellectually it is, and is intended
to be, distinct from conventional Marxism as such. It is not a
“neo-Marxism.” It is intended to be something new; it is an “Aca-
demic Sociology." In some places it is, in fact, expressly character-
ized as an assimilation of “Western” sociology. In the Soviet Union
it is taking its deepest root in Moscow. Leningrad, and Novosibirsk,
and is judged there by standards that are quite distinguishable
from those of traditional Marxism-Leninism. It is creating new
research institutes. It is publishing an increasing number of trans-
lations of American theoretical works, including the strongly func-
tionalist Sociology Today, and while it is often focused on, it is not
confined to, merely technical volumes on research methods. Young
people especially, I was told, are widely and greatly interested in
the emerging sociology.

2. While the development of sociology in the Soviet Bloc is, of
course, very uneven, it is also producing interesting theoretical
work, as evidenced, for example, by the Polish Sociological Bulletin,
which, notably, is published in English. In particular, perhaps,
their grasp of stratification theory is increasingly sophisticated.
Soviet work on organizational analysis also manifests a rapid
growth in sophistication. Some of the applied communications
research both at Talinn and Novosibirsk seems to be of a high
order, as is the demographic work at Novosibirsk. More generally,
the Novosibirsk group seems to be producing very creditable
mathematical social science.

It is my impression that some Soviet sociologists are in no
hurry to make systematic contributions to social theory — on any
level of complexity — because they fear that this will have a dis-
unifying effect upon the emerging Soviet sociology. In brief, they

460 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

seem to fear that theory-making may accentuate the differences
among Soviet sociologists, and that such intellectual divisiveness
would be particularly injurious at the present stage of the institu-
tional development of Soviet sociology. The development of Soviet
sociological theory would also be more likely to increase the strain
between Soviet sociology and Soviet Marxism. Many Soviet sociolo-
gists, then, are building their new institutions with a great deal of
self-consciousness, though it does not, of course, imply that all are.

This suggests that they will give fuller rein to those forms of work

such as “concrete’ or quantitative researches or methodological
developments — that are apt to win easier acceptance and to
generate more consensus among themselves. In short, quantita-
tive and methodological interests are more compatible with the
present, still early stage of the institutionalization of Soviet soci-
ology, since they constitute solidarity-enhancing foci.

3. As the foregoing implies, there was in 1966 an increasing
openness in Eastern European nations to the work of American
sociologists. Their interest in reading more American sociology,
and in having access to work by American sociologists, whether
translated or in English, was repeatedly evidenced. Their complaint
was not that political authorities prevented these books from
entering, but that shortages of library funds were inhibiting them.
Some young people specifically volunteered a desire to read the
recent mathematical work of James Coleman and Harrison White.
Their elders wanted more opportunities for face-to-face contact
with American sociologists and were, at that time, clearly vying
with one another to be able to attend the conference of the Inter-
national Sociological Association to be held at Evian in 1966. They
look forward to more foreign exchange programs between their
scholars and our own.

4. They make quite realistic judgments about the technical
worth of their work thus far and evidence a determined ambition
to improve it. Soviet sociologists feel that their as yet unpublished
work is decidedly superior to that which has recently been pub-
lished in Russia and also to much that has been translated into
English recently.

5. Corresponding to their sober appraisals of Soviet sociolog)',
they also seem to have a growing realism in their judgments about
Soviet institutions and social stratification, which augurs well for
the quality of future research. Thus, for example, one Soviet spe-
cialist in social stratification had this to say:

Our conceptions of social stratification have changed greatly. . . •
We once thought-or Stalin said-we only had two strata or classes, in-

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology 461

telligentsia and workers-farmers. Now we know better. There are many,
and many new ones, In the 1930’s we thought that the differences be-
tween strata would soon disappear, but we see that they haven’t. And
they won’t disappear for . . . certainly another fifteen years. The dif-
ferences between them are more than matters of income. They are also
differences in education, culture, prestige. It will take more than in-
creased education to eliminate them. It will also need technological
development and automation. Today it is often difficult to get people to
take or stay at dull jobs. Well, we will get rid of the dull jobs with
technological change. But the interesting jobs of today will be viewed
as dull when technology develops. Social mobility today is also not what
we had thought; the sons of workers are also more likely to be workers
themselves.

6. Soviet sociology has given considerable stress to what it
characterizes as “concrete” research. “Concrete” is the resonating
programmatic concept around which much of the new develop-
ment of Soviet sociology is formed and without an understanding
of which it cannot be properly assessed. Suffice it to say here that
the term “concrete” does not seem simply to recommend empirical
research on practical problems. The concept of a concrete sociology
does not simply give positive affirmation to a new program of
empirical work, but also implies a tacit critical judgment of older
forms of theoretical analysis. It seems to embody a growing readi-
ness to reject theoretical work that is not empirically founded and,
indeed, to reject all self-sealing and self-validating approaches to
social theory. It also appears to express reservations about more
speculative, future-oriented work and to entail a greater focus upon
contemporary conditions. The concept of concrete sociology, then,
is both the sloganistic spearhead of a new program of research
and a terse, implicit critique of an older style of speculative
theorizing.

7. Accompanying this is a more flexible and, indeed, a more
rigorously scientific attitude among Eastern European sociologists
toward Marxism and Historical Materialism itself. I should mention
that I deliberately went out of my way to learn what Soviet sociolo-
gists thought about the relationship between the new concrete
sociology and traditional Marxism-Leninism. I made a point of
asking what they thought would happen if research results ap-
peared to invalidate Marxism. The answers were various; some
intelligent, some courageous, some ingenuous, and some not. Yet
the central tendei cy seems to come down to this ; there is a grow-^
ing conception of Marxism as a guide to research, which is to say,
as a researchable model, rather than as a self-evident, self-sufficient
metaphysics. Indeed, Marxism itself was on several occasions

462 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

expressly and, I think, significantly characterized as a “model.”
Here I have in mind informal comments by various Soviet sociolo-
gists, such as those that follow :

Many of our philosophers write books on Historical Materialism. We
believe there need not be only one approach or one way of presenting
Historical Materialism and that it is good that different men should
write about Historical Materialism. . . . First, it must be remembered
that Historical Materialism is a theory and that life is more complex
and larger than any theory. All theory has limitations. Second, if life
differs from the theory it may be not because the theory is wrong, but
because conditions have prevented the theory from being fulfilled. So
one has to change the conditions. . . . Marxism is not the Bible. It does
not stay still for all time. ... A theory is a theory. Concrete sociology
may add something new. Old truths may be improved. Concrete research
is a deepening of theory. It checks up on how theory conforms to reality.

All this does not imply, however, that Soviet sociologists regard
the results of concrete research as defining the essence of Soviet
“reality.” What Soviet sociologists conceive of as “real” is still
greatly shaped by their larger social theories and domain assump-
tions — in short, by Marxism. In this, however, they do not appear
to be radically different from those Western sociologists, committed
to Functional theory, whose conceptions of social reality are also
influenced by the metaphysical commitments of their own social
theory. The decisive consideration is the extent to which these
metaphysical commitments are viewed as susceptible to empirical
disconfirmation, the extent to which they are conceived of either
as a “model” of reality or as indisputably real apart from their
researchable implications. In these respects, Soviet sociologists
appear to be converging with their Western counterparts.

8. The growth of a distinct sociological specialization in Eastern
Europe is not to be understood as the reassertion of "antisocialist”
or “antiparty” views by the older intelligentsia of the universities.
First, the real vitality of Eastern European sociology is often among
the younger men. Second, and more important, the new sociology
is often led today by men who enjoy positions of trust within the
communist parties of their countries and who are unquestionably
loyal to them. Indeed, so far as I could judge, some of the best
sociology — some of the most theoretically sophisticated and em-
pirically rigorous sociology, even by American standards — is being
produced by Communist Party members.

It would be absurd to assume that the emergence of Soviet
sociology and its larger meanings have somehow escaped the notice
of the leaders of the Communist Party. It is far more realistic to
assume that these developments are taking place with the tentative
sponsorship of highly placed party leaders, in the course of which

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology 463

the political leaders themselves are taking liens on new, as yet
undeveloped, policy options, unlocking if not yet opening new
doors, and enlarging their arena for political maneuver.

It should be added that this is a door that could be locked once
more. The future of Eastern European sociolog}' is most directly
—but not entirely — contingent upon the continuance of liberaliz-
ing trends within the Soviet Union, particularly those that have
manifested themselves — albeit with powerful counter-movements
— since the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party; it is
contingent, also, upon the maintenance of certain levels of national
autonomy and political freedom in the countries of the Soviet Bloc.

SOCIAL SOURCES OF ACADEMIC SOCIOLOGY
IN THE SOVIET UNION

What were some of the societal factors contributing to this recent
growth or revival of an Academic Sociology in the Soviet Union?
This is worth exploring, because, in pursuing it, we can learn
something more about the conditions that are, in general, con-
ducive to an Academic Sociology anywhere, including the United
States. Furthermore, since an answ’er to this question must entail
some concern with the nature of the societal mandate within which
Soviet sociolog}- operates, it may help us to formulate a more
realistic conjecture of the course of its future development.

Starting with the fact obvious to most observers of recent Soviet
events, it is clear that the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist
Party in 1956 was the first move in the events that led to the
emergence of Soviet sociolog}’, and of Yugoslavian and Polish
sociolog}- as well. The attack upon Stalinism launched what came
to be called the “thaw.” The thaw remains precarious, and Eastern
European intellectuals are often as mindful of this as we; but
despite the profoundly illiberal implications of the Soviet invasion
of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the icy blasts that this brought, the
Soviets are still far, indeed, from returning to the rigidity of the
Stalin era. Muddied and slowed, the thaw remains, if one compares
the present situation with the Stalinist baseline.

The thaw had, at least, two consequences. First, it relaxed,
political controls over cultural life and, in general, permitted the
different cultural sectors and the various technical intelligentsia
in charge of them a larger area of autonomy. It established a

464 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

greater measure of security for cultural and intellectual innovation.
There is no question that the reemergence of an Academic Soci-
olog}' throughout Eastern Europe is associated with this move
toward liberalizing Soviet life. Second, the official exposure of
Stalinism also engendered a period of widespread disillusionment
with and increasing skepticism about official accounts of life in the
Soviet Union and elsewhere. The attack on Stalinism meant that
Soviet authority was being discredited authoritatively. There arose
a “crisis of confidence” concerning official communications and
media, and this brought increased public interest in those descrip-
tions of life that w r ere untainted by association with official sources.

It was not simply, however, that the Soviet “man in the street”
wanted to know what was really going on in the world and could
now more freely express this interest; it was also that Soviet man-
agers had a similar need, and that the new Soviet political leaders
had to satisfy this need in order to restabilize their leadership. They
had to overcome the attenuated relationship between leadership
and masses that had developed during the Stalin era, and, to do
this, they needed to know what the people were thinking. It was in
this period that public opinion polls ajso emerged in the Soviet Union,
reflecting the new Soviet leadership’s inability to operate within
the previously official myth of a unanimity of opinion and, at the
same time, symbolizing and evidencing their greater readiness to
be responsive to some of the varied preferences and wants of the
Soviet public . 14 The new Soviet interest in sociology, then, derives
partly from an interest in a more believable and realistic picture of
the world. Soviet sociology serves as a kind of academic “journal-
ism” in whose reports one can have relative confidence; and Soviet
leaders and managers are themselves not just a little interested in
having such reports.

Since it was an act of political liberalization that clearly ex-
panded the framework in which Soviet sociology could emerge, it
would be very surprising if the vested interests of Soviet sociolo-
gists and those of their public did not, in some part, serve to shape
their conceptions of their societal mission. Soviet sociologists do
not, to put it mildly, see it as their job to restore Stalinism. How
then do they see their role and the role of sociology?

Cr.' : ,< of Marxism and Academic Sociofogy

465

WE MANDATE OF SOVIET SOCIOLOGY:
SOCIETAL INTEGRATION

[n attempting to talk about this with me, Soviet sociologists fre-
quently spoke of “disproportions" and “imbalances" in their society,
and of the need to correct them. It is this, far more than their
involvement in industrial sociology and social psychology, that
provides the best clue to Soviet sociologists' deepest conception
of their societal mandate. It was in the language of "disproportions"
and “imbalances” that they sought to communicate what they were
up to, and, in the end, this comes down to the problem of integrat-
ing the society:

As our country becomes developed and more complex the balance of
relationships needs to be understood. Sociology is the instrument which
connects economy with social life, economy with spiritual life. It helps
to integrate different sectors of socicty-not that our society is unin-
regrated-but to help realign proportions and mechanisms of Interre-
lationships. There are die connections in social life to be understood
and explained [author’s italics).

Quite independently, so far as I could see, some Yugoslavian
sociologists also conceived of their tasks in the same manner. In
short, the rhetoric in terms of which Soviet sociology's societal
mission is legitimated is almost identical with that winch Saint-
Simon had used to lecitimate his new science of society. It is the

466 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

sociology’s mission in society entails the tacit assumption that one
takes as given the jobs that have to be done, the basic - social roles
for which people have to be prepared, and the basic institutions in
which these have to operate. For this reason there has been a grow-
ing interest in the sociology of industry, particularly for the leverage
this may provide in finding extra - wage motives and rtonpecuniary
incentives. (As one Soviet colleague explained, “Men work for
different reasons, out of a sense of responsibility or merely for the
wages. Wages are so highly emphasized and other values are still
underdeveloped.”) But the Soviet sociology of industry is concerned
with only a special case of the larger task, the task, as one man
put it, of “adjusting expectations to reality.” Nothing could make
it clearer than this statement does that Soviet sociology, like
Western Functionalism, takes certain parts of its social world as
given and views its mission as making these work together more
smoothly. The problem is one of getting men to fit into and accept
social institutions that are treated largely as givens. To conceive
of integration as a problem of “proportions” is to conceive of it in
terms of a model which views the system as having “requisites” and
“parts” that remain essentially stable, though their links with one
another may be strengthened or modified.

The new Soviet sociology — like the Western tradition of sociology
from Comte to Parsons — is committed to its own established eco-
nomic institutions and to the basic rudiments of its system of
stratification. It defines its task, essentially, as making these run
effectively and making the rest of society fit smoothly into the
boundaries which these establish. The most basic assumption of
Soviet sociologists, like that of most American Functionalists, is
that the major problems of their economy have, indeed, been
solved, and, in particular, that they can now take their economy
as given, and proceed from that point:

Our first need was to establish the objective conditions of a good
group life-the foundation. We have done that. Now we face the prob-
lem of developing social relations, the spiritual life, culture. ... We
used to and had to think mostly about economic things, but now we can
think about social and spiritual things.

The emergence of a “Western-type” Academic Sociology in the
Soviet Union, then, is premised on the development of the Soviet
economy and its industrial basis. If the liberalization of Soviet
politics provided the opportunity for Soviet sociology to emerge, it
was the maturation of ^Soviet industrialization — and the growth
of technical and admitu^ative strata whose careers depend on
their technical effectiveness^- that often provided the motives to
take advantage of that opportunity. Soviet industrialization is the

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology 467

essential premise of Soviet sociology. The problems of integrating
and managing the Soviet form of industrialization define the main
problems to which Soviet sociology will dedicate itself.

A MODEL OF THE STRUCTURAL SOURCES OF
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF ACADEMIC
SOCIOLOGY

Seen from the standpoint of an interest in the sociological analysis
of sociology itself, the development of an Academic Sociology in
the Soviet Union may be taken as one case in a larger set of cases;
namely, those evidencing the successful institutionalization of Aca-
demic Sociology. The Soviet case thus enlarges the “sample” of such
cases and, along with those others, both the successes and failures
provides a basis for further refining our views concerning the social
conditions under which an Academic Sociology becomes institu-
tionalized. Recognizing that the Soviet case has important historical
and national differences from others, we may employ it, nonethe-
less, to propose a provisional model that outlines the social condi-
tions under which an Academic Sociology generally becomes insti-
tutionalized. The development of an Academic Sociology in the
Soviet Union makes it evident that this is not necessarily linked to
a specifically capitalist form of industrialization, and suggests that
it is likely to occur in any type of industrial society at a certain
stage in its development.

An Academic Sociology becomes institutionalized:

1. Where industrialization has, at least, reached the “take-off”
point and become self-sustaining.

2. Where, in consequence, social theorists and others can more
readily define and conceptualize their society’s problems as non-
economic or purely “social,” which is to say, as distinct from
economic problems.

3. Where, in consequence of its productivity, the new technology
can provide mass gratifications and thus win the loyalty of large
groups.

4. Where, in consequence, the threat of “restorationism” has
been defeated. Thus the master institutions and the national elites,
by which industrialization is developed and controlled are now
widely accepted by members of the society. The remaining issues
under contention are not viewed as matters having to do with the

468 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

strategy of industrialization and of the social classes that will con-
trol it, but are regarded essentially as a question of tactics. (Thus
what is now being experimented with in the Soviet Union is
decentralized management, and while this is important, it certainly
does not entail any thought of a return to private ownership and to
the inheritance of factories.) Under these conditions, the residual
political contests are not defined as entailing differences about the
most basic interests and issues, concerning which men feel so
strongly that they will not accept political defeat without resorting
to force and civil war.

5. Where, in consequence of all this, forms of political liberaliza-
tion may be permitted and extended, for the differences among
contending factions are now less critical, and ruling political
factions may accept the loss of office peacefully, because they do
not believe that their successors will change the society in ways
that violate their most fundamental values and commitments.

6. As industrialization proceeds there is a growth in the numbers
of the technical and administrative elites, and in the specialization
and professionalization of a management whose authority rests
upon an imputed competence based on technical skills, reliable
information, and scientific methods. Their careers come increas-
ingly to depend upon their demonstrable effectiveness, or the
"results” they produce, and other considerations become more
extraneous, particularly as the “restoration” or counterrevolutionary
threat is defeated or subsides. The technical-administrative elites
increasingly desire and press toward larger areas of discretion for
themselves and have a vested interest in increasing “sector au-
tonomy.”

7. Partly as a result of this, greater autonomy will be developed
and permitted among different sectors of the society. For now each
sector of the society is under less pressure to testify to its basic
political loyalties and can be allowed greater freedom to operate
in terms of its own specialized standards and different technical
criteria — in other words, more "autonomously.”

8. Where, in consequence, the problem of the coordination of
different social sectors grows, but comes to be seen in a distinctive
way; that is, as a task for public authority, but one that is not
primarily political but technical in character. In other words, diffi-
culties of coordination — “imbalances” — are not defined as due to dis-
loyalty, or resistance and deep-going hostility, toward the society’s
master institutions and^ national elites. Public problems are less
likely to be defined as expressing a deliberate intent to overthrow
or subvert the master institutions.

9. The institutionalization of Academic Sociology, then, is
essentially a part or a special case of the more general development

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology 469

of sector autonomy. It is both a symbolic and an instrumental
response to the growing problem of integrating social sectors that
are becoming, all the while, increasingly autonomous and differ-
entiated. It is “instrumental” in that it contributes, in practical and
“applied” ways, to the efficient integration of different social sectors
and levels. It is “symbolic” in that it concerns itself with formulat-
ing a “mapping” of the society that locates different social parts,
symbolically connecting and representing them as part of a larger
social whole.

Whether symbolically or instrumental^ significant, an Academic
Sociology becomes institutionalized when the integration, the sector
coordination, of an industrial society is defined as the responsibility
of public authorities, and as a technical task rather than as a
problem in policing and political mobilization. The public authority
is seen ultimately as contributing to the mutual self-coordination
and “self-control” of various sectors, and not as a substitute for
them.

This, in turn, is compatible with a view of the various sectors as
basically loyal and functionally differentiated, rather than as “sub-
versive” and hierarchically stratified. There is therefore less incli-
nation for the public authority to superintend closely each sector
in its relations with others. Such an inclination corresponds to
a conception of a society as a “system,” in which emphasis is
placed on the interdependence of its parts because of their spe-
cialized functions, and where this mutual dependence — and not
only external imperative control — is expected to foster social
integration. It is under these conditions that social integration
comes to be defined as a “balance” problem, as the mutual accomo-
dation of parts to one another, rather than as the imposition of
the central control of one part over all the others. Integration is
then seen as deriving from an internal and “spontaneous” balance
rather than as entailing an external control.

The Soviet and the American systems have moved toward this
common conception from opposite directions. The Soviet system
has been moving toward it from a highly controlled and centralized
state apparatus, and its movement entails a relaxation of public
authority. The American system has been moving toward it from
a state relatively laissez faire in character, and its movement
entails an increase in public authority. While both, therefore, are
attracted to a conception of a society as self-maintaining and self-
coordinating, what is problematic in the American system is to
legitimate the increase in public authority, while what is prob-
lematic in the Soviet case is to legitimate the decrease in it. What
is important, therefore, for American theorists operating within
the tradition of Functionalism is to find a way of incorporating

470 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

the growing state initiative and political control into their tradi-
tional theoretical focus on system analysis. What is important for
Soviet theorists, however, is to find or develop a social theory that
stresses a non-hierarchicalized view of system interdependence,
while minimizing conflict with tire Soviet commitment to Marxism
and its essentially hierarchical domain assumptions.

Paradoxically, then, an academic conception of sociolog)’ seems
to arise where, for all its talk about the importance of moral values,
men seem to have at least tacitly acknowledged the priority of the
economic process and to have committed their loyalty to a specific
form of industrialization. It is then that a sociology can be per-
mitted to hold that it is objective, value-free, and above the political
struggle; the society is no longer engaged in a critical struggle
about what are felt to be its most basic values, and its elites are
correspondingly confident that they can rely on the support of its
social scientists, at least on the most basic issues. In other words,
a sociology with a nonpartisan self-image can become institution-
alized when the elites of a society are confident that its social
scientists are, in fact, not neutral.

I would not, however, wish to suggest that Soviet sociologists
no longer have any need to put forth evidences of their “loyalty”
to Soviet ideology. It seems to me that there still is such a need,
as evidenced, for example, by the continuing and ritualistic use of
quotations from the classical Marxist literature, and by the many
articles and books that Soviet sociologists still write which are
compulsively critical of American sociology. Nonetheless, this need
to provide public evidence of one’s loyalty seems to be declining,
and there is a correspondingly greater emphasis on operating with
the special and relevant standards distinctive to sociology itself.
While I heard no claim among Soviet sociologists that theirs was
a “value-free” sociology, they did vigorously remark upon the
importance of maintaining “objectivity” in the social sciences. In
a similar vein, they also complained about some Soviet historians
who had rewritten history to laud the contributions of certain
political leaders; such work, they said, only made people lose con-
fidence in historical writings in general and undermined their
public credibility.

As conditions generally conducive to an “objective” style of
Academic Sociology emerge in Eastern Europe, the most general
framework is being established for a more favorable reception of
and dialogue with Functionalism. This cannot fully develop, how-
ever, without fundamental changes in Soviet conceptions of their
own future and, in particular, in their attitudes toward the coming
of a full-fledged communism. Correspondingly, the growth of Soviet
interest in Functionalism zuill imply that these future-oriented atti-

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology 471

tudes ,:i have already begun a massive recession. To say that Func-
tionalism is growing and will grow in appeal in Eastern Europe,
is to say that the millenarian expectations of Soviet Marxism will
decline; it is to say that Soviet society is slowing its forward lunge
toward a radically different or “communist” future; it is to say that
its desire for a “communist” future radically different from and
superior to the “socialist” present, is diminishing in vitality. It is to
imply that Soviet men are coming to live in a present that they
hope to improve substantially, but which they do not expect to
undergo basic structural changes.

Correspondingly, a key index to be watched in the work of Soviet
sociologists, and one which will signify that their transition to a
Functionalist model is fully underway, is whether they continue to
use or to reject a "cultural lag” theory to explain the deficiencies of
their own society. Characteristically, Soviet social scientists of
earlier generations explained the deficiencies of Soviet society in
terms of a theory of cultural lag. That is, they explained flaws as
due to the remnants of a bourgeois society that had still not
withered away. For this reason, I thought it particularly significant
that — whatever they say publicly — hardly any of the Soviet soci-
ologists with whom I spoke privately employed such an explanatory
gambit. To speak, as I have earlier, of the growing “realism” of
Soviet sociologists is another way of saying the same thing.

In seems likely that any decline in the future-oriented perspec-
tive of Soviet sociologists will more likely be evidenced first and
most fully in the more microscopic, quantitative studies of specific
organizations and establishments than in the more macroscopic
studies of their society’s basic institutions, its stratificational sys-
tem, its science and technology, or its kinship and community
structures. It is likely that much the same distinction could be
made for American sociolog)’ as well, for it too is, in part, con-
strained by the very nature of the research methods it uses in the
more microscopic studies. One might also expect that the shift to
less future-oriented researches will take place along generational
lines, the younger being less future-oriented, while the older
generation will still give greater emphasis to more macroscopic,
future-oriented work.

It does seem probable, however — and it should be expected —
that Soviet sociologists will, in general, remain more future-oriented
than are American sociologists. However, it is possible that some
part of this is not peculiar to Soviet society or Marxism, but may
he a common characteristic of Europe and European sociology
more generally. Before making a judgment about the extent of
the future-orientedness of Soviet sociology, one must be careful to
distinguish between it and a more general historical orientation. In

472 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

my opinion a decisive question is the extent to which Soviet
scholars manifest a belief that future Soviet society will be both
radically different from and clearly superior to present Soviet
society and, if so, on what this difference and superiority is felt
to be based. There seems little question that Soviet social scientists
presently believe that the future Soviet society will be a better one.
They believe, however, that this improvement wall come from the
development of science and technology, and not from changes in
the other master institutions. In short, while glowing hopes are
still held for the future, these rest upon factors already found in
the present, which, apparently, is no\v being seen as more con-
tinuous with the future than it once was. At the same time, how-
ever, there are also indications that technological developments are
increasingly being seen not only as producing progress, but, to
some extent, as producing problems as well. The growing interest
among Soviet and Eastern European sociologists in moral beliefs,
ethics, 1 " and individual character and values would seem to signify
a decline in the reliance they place on science and technology or
in their belief that the future development of these alone can solve
their society’s problems. In other words, the sheer shift in intel-
lectual interests that this new emphasis on morality manifests
probably indicates something of a decline in future-orientedness.

When the social conditions outlined above are more fully estab-
lished, the sociologies of West and East will manifest a growing
convergence and a common interest in the maintenance of domes-
tic order, in working out the "residual” frictions in their societies,
in balancing and fine-tuning the relations among their different
sectors. Commonly committed to the maintenance and develop-
ment of their own forms of industrialization, and taking these ends
as given, sociology both East and West will stress the importance of
objectivity. In its larger societal implications, this means that they
will adopt a technological view 7 of the management of society,,
appraising the operation of its various sectors primarily with a view
to increasing their efficiency, reducing the costs and frictions of
their operation within the context of the master institutions
governing the industrialization, and accommodating other social
arrangements to them. It is then that a sociology concerned with
the metaphysics of "system” and ‘‘function,” a Functionalism, can
develop.

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology

473

THE COMING READJUSTMENT IN WORLD
SOCIOLOGY

The development of an Academic Sociolog}’ in the Soviet Union
implies that Marxism today, no less than Functionalism in the
United States, is confronting new problems and difficulties of major
proportions. The sheer development of Academic Sociolog}’ in
Eastern Europe is a symptom not only that these new problems
have emerged, but also that they have already been at least partly
recognized by leading members of the Communist Party, who sense
die need for new intellectual tools. Surely they know, and expect,
that a developed “concrete” or Academic Sociology will have to
interact with “Historical Materialism” or Marxism-Leninism; and,
in point of fact, no scholar with whom I spoke in Eastern Europe
expected that such an interaction would produce only one-sided
effects. There is every likelihood that the continued growth of an
Academic Sociology in Eastern Europe means that Marxism itself
will develop and change substantially.

A major intellectual development in world sociology is impend-
ing, and it will be accelerated to the extent that Marxism and
Academic Sociology’ move into increasing contact and mutual dia-
logue. The most basic historical hiatus in world sociology, which
divides the heirs of Comte and of Marx, seems to be beginning a
readjustment, a readjustment expressed in their relationship with
one another and in their own internal organization. This mutual
interaction and readjustment does not necessarily mean that they
trill both end in the same place or converge on a single model, but
it seems likely that, in some respects, they wall come closer together
than ever before. How rapidly this will occur remains an even more
difficult question, and it would be easy to confuse the visibility of
the process with its speed. It needs to be remembered, for example,
the the Soviet Sociological Association was founded only in 1958
and that tire first cross-republic meeting of Soviet sociologists
occurred only in 1966. We are, then, probably dealing with a
process that will take another generation at least to achieve a new
equilibrium.

I have suggested earlier in this chapter that any social change
that contributes to peaceful cooperation between the United States
and the Soviet Union has a claim upon the favor of all men of
good will; nonetheless, a larger judgment on the growing con-
vergence between their social sciences must also seriously consider

474 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociolog)'

the basis on which this convergence may come about. There is
after all, always the possibility of a Mettemichian unity. The terms
of an agreement, or what the parties agree on, is an important
problem deserving of special consideration. If, for example, the
sociology of the United States and the Soviet Union should com-
monly evolve toward methodologically empiricist standpoints, such
as cybernetics, systems analysis, or operations research — a develop-
ment by no means impossible — it will presage a culture dominated
by spiritless technicians, useful and usable creatures, where any
form of sociological humanism has been blighted. Far better
Functionalism, even “static” Functionalism; far better Marxism,
even “vulgar” Marxism.

The nature of the readjustment that is and will be taking place
between Marxism and Functionalism will depend, in important
part, upon the manner in which each develops internally, as well
as on the kinds of influence each exerts upon the other. This, in
turn, means that it will partly depend upon the manner in which
“concrete” or Academic Sociology in the Soviet Union itself develops
and, most especially, on the way in which it resolves some of its
most important internal tensions. The central conflict in Soviet
Academic Sociology is between those, on the one hand, who con-
ceive of and support it primarily as an instrumental tool, because
of its usefulness as a technological aid in administration and
management, and those, on the other hand, for whom Academic
Sociology is ideologically rooted in their own liberal impulses and
who want to see it developed because they believe it will contribute
to a more humanistic culture. This is a tension by no means
peculiar to Academic Sociology in the Soviet Union, for it is found
throughout Europe, East and West, and in the United States as
well.

While Academic Sociology today manifests a variety of internal
tensions, I do not believe that its most basic one exists between
those who are methodological empiricists and those who favor
theory-oriented research, or between research and theory, or even
between proponents of “applied” and “pure” research. Robert
Merton and Henry Riecken have rightly suggested that there has
been a strong tendency for the empirical research of the new Soviet
sociology to involve a kind of “practical realism,” with little interest
in pursuing the theoretical implications of what has been ob-
served. 17 I do not believe, however, that those Soviet sociologists
who object to such “practical realism” see the alternative merely as
a "pure” sociology with a strong theoretical commitment. They have
a broader vision of the new sociology, being sensitive to its ideo-
logical and value implications; above all, they often see it as part
of a larger liberalization of Soviet life. If such men may be said to

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology

be drawn to some version of a “criticaT sociology, the practical
realists are, in their turn, essentially supporting an “administrative"
sociology-. That is, the latter are not simply engaged in a form of
research but are agents of social control, while the former are not
simply interested in building a pure sociolotjy but a more humane
society.

The meaning of a rapprochement between Soviet and American
sociolog}-, or between Academic Sociology and Marxism, will de-
pend greatly on the extent to which each is committed to an
administrative or managerial sociology. An administrative sociology
is essentially an instrument for making the status quo work better.
If it supports new programs and new policies, it does so within a
framework whose aim is to protect and strengthen the existent
master institutions of its society, rather than examine them as a
source of the society's problems. An administrative sociology views
the world from the standpoint of the values and needs of the
administrative elites in the society and is shaped by the initiatives,
perspectives, and limits of such elites. An administrative sociology
fosters an understanding tolerance of the status quo. While ac-
knowledging that it has problems, it regards these as surmountable
within the framework of the master institutions and without
making basic changes. .And the solutions it seeks, appraises, and
evaluates are limited to those compatible with the fundamental
lineaments of the status quo and its master institutions. The cen-
tral social function of an administrative sociology is to find less
costly and more effective ways of satisfying the distinctive re-
quirements of the institutional status quo.

An administrative sociolog}- commonly tends to have a mechan-
ical and technocratic view of the alternative solutions for the
problems of the status quo. It commonly fails to see that policies
are accepted not because they are the most useful to society as a
whole, but because their proponents are the most powerful, and
the alternative thev support most useful to them. In short, an ad-
ministrative sociologv misses the nature of the competition and
struggle between alternative solutions. It fails to see the political
character of the process by which one alternative wins out over
its competitors, and it systematically neglects the power dimension
in its explanatorv analyses. Administrative sociology thinks bureau-
cratically rather than politically. It is. in effect, simply searching
for less costly and more effective ways of meeting the basic require-
ments of the status quo. outside of the political process.

47 6

The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

INSTITUTES AND UNIVERSITY CONTEXTS
FOR SOCIOLOGY

The relation between such an administrative sociology and a
“critical” sociology, the balance of power between them, is a func-
tion of several influences. One is the immediate institutional milieu
in which a sociology develops and. operates on a daily basis. Broadly
speaking, there are two distinct sociology-shaping local milieux,
the “university” and the “institute.” This structural differentiation
is not peculiar to Soviet or Eastern European sociology, and may be
found throughout all of Western Europe and in the United States.

In the United States, sociological and social science institutes
are likely to be somewhat “entrepreneurial” organizations, actively
initiating research projects; they serve as middlemen or brokers
between, on the one hand, a variety of clients with interests in
various forms of applied sociology and, on the other, the university
faculty with the skills and interest in performing such services.
Eastern European institutes, while by no means devoid of entre-
preneurial inclination, are somewhat more closely affiliated with
the state apparatus and more fully dependent upon the funding
it provides. The Eastern European institutes thus tend to be more
closely controlled by the Communist Party than are the sociological
faculties primarily located in universities. Indeed, there is often
a visible difference in the intellectual perspectives of sociologists
operating in these two contexts, accompanied by patterns of differ-
ential association, not to speak of incipient tensions between them.
There seems little question that, everywhere in the world, the
institute context provides a more favorable milieu than the uni-
versity for the development of an administrative sociology. If the
institute is the institutional incubator of an administrative soci-
ology, however, it is not its ultimate source of power and support.
In the first and last analysis, this power derives from the political
initiatives and massive funding provided by the state, and it is on
the support of the state that the prospects of an administrative
sociology — in and out of the Soviet Union — most depend.

Despite the fact that, for this reason, an administrative sociology
in Eastern Europe will commonly be less liberal in its political
undertones, it is an exasperating contradiction that the dominant
elites within American sociolog)' are most often likely to favor the
very kind of Soviet sociology that is typical of the institutes.
Specifically, they are more likely to favor the more hardware-using,
high science-oriented, methodologically empiricist work congenial

Crisis of Marxism and Academic Sociology 477

to the needs of an institute-based administrative sociology. Para-
doxically, then, the international influence exerted by the official
spokesmen of American sociology is often likely to support the
more communist-controlled and less liberal wing of Soviet sociology’.

NOTES

1. N. Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (New
York: International Publishers, 1925).

2. I have in mind especially Merton’s analysis of anomie, in which he
argues that, as a result of a specific type of class system, members of the
lower class are socialized to desire the same goals as the middle class, but,
being lower class, lack the same opportunity to realize these goals and may,
therefore, become anomic. Here, in effect, Merton uses Marx to pry open
Durkheim. See Merton’s “Anomie and Social Structure” in his Social Theory
and Social Structure (Glencoe, 111 .; The Free Press, 1957).

3. See, for example, Peter L. Berger, ed., Marxism and Sociology (New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969).

4. Louis Althusser, Pour Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1968); Louis Althusser,
Jacques Ranciere, and Pierre Manchery, Lire Le Capital, Volume I (Paris:
Maspero, 1968); Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, and Roger Establet, Lire
Le Capital, Volume II (Paris: Maspero, 1968).

5. Nicos Poulantzas, Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociales de I’Etat Capi-
taliste (Paris: Maspero, 1968).

6. For example, Roger Garaudy, Peut-on etre communiste aujourd'hui?
(Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1968).

7. See, for example, the collection in E. Fromm, ed., Socialist Humanism
(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966), as well as the Yugoslavian peri-
odical P raxis.

8. Adam Schaff, Marhsism a jednospha Pudzka (Warsaw, 1965).

9. Norman Bimbaum, “The Crisis in Marxist Sociology,” Social Research,
XXXV, No. 2 (Summer 1968), 350-380.

10. A collection of articles bearing on this discussion is to be found in
John V. Murra et al., ed. and trans.. The Soviet Linguistic Controversy (New
York: King’s Crown Press, 1951 ).

11. Recent discussions by Soviet scholars of this infrastructure-superstruc-
ture problem are to be found in the writings of V. P. Tugarinov ( Voprosy
filosofi, 1958): M. Kammari (K ommunist, 1956); A. E. Furman ( Filosofshie
Nauki, 1965, and Voprosy filosofi, 1965).

12. Important contributions to the discussion of this problem have already
been made by scholars such as Herbert Marcuse and Norman Bimbaum. See
H. Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1958).

13. A. Wildavsky, 'The Political Economy of Efficiency: Cost-Benefit Anal-
sis, Systems Analysis, and Program Budgeting,” Public Administration Re-
mem, XXVI, No. 4 (December 1966), 305.

14. See Paul Hollander, 'The Dilemmas of Soviet Sociology,” in Alex
Simirenko, Soviet Sociology (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966).

15. For a discussion of the importance of these see George Fischer, Sci-
ence and Ideology in Soviet Society (New York: Atherton Press, 1967).

16. Among the prominent expressions of such concerns, that found in the
work of L. Kolakowski is one of the most important.

17. See R. Merton and H. Riecken, “Notes on Sociology in the USSR,”
Current Problems in Social-Behavioral Research, Symposia Studies No. 10
(Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Social and Behavioral Science, No-
vember 1962).

PART IV

Epilogue: The Theorist Pulls
H imseli Together, Partially

o 7 J

♦ ‘ v- i r

< >
. )

hiving as a Snriningisl ;
Laward a J\r/!r:nv r Snrinlntry

7 yv

I havr torn*- to tin- end of my work ben-. and I am aware that
ending may b<- tr-.i-.tcd for tin- wrote,; reasons. Yet there remains
the urn- a *.y frr-ling that something more needs savins;, even in tills
limited effort, I sense that something has been omitted or glossed
and that if 1 fail to clarify it the preceding work will be not only
incomplete but dishonest. To be explicit, 1 believe that, having
spent much time haring the assumptions In the work of others, I
should now do the same with my own work here. Presumably, I
should now he able to dissect myself; ideally, and without defensive'
ness or self-flagellation, I should he able to outline my own major
assumptions in some modestly coherent manner, if not evaluate
them. Hut I also believe that such an effort is doomed to failure,
for no man can he his own critic, and. in pretending that he can,
lie promises to deliver far more than lie really wants. Still, some
self-knowledge is possible, and if 1 make the effort to disclose my
operating assumptions, while warning of the distortion and in-
completeness to which this effort is inevitably subject, I may
render it easier for my critics to perform their own task.

481

402

Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

SOCIAL THEORY AND PERSONAL REALITY
IN “THE COMING CRISIS
OF WESTERN SOCIOLOGY’ ’

With this, we come to certain difficult, not to say delicate, ques-
tions. For it ought now to be perfectly plain (at least to some) that
there is a deep convergence between what Gouldner has, in this
volume, claimed to see in the world of sociology and what the
earlier Gouldner had been doing all along in that same world.
There is a congruence between what Gouldner has here said is
happening in modem sociology — most especially, his thesis about
the growing convergence between Functionalism and Marxism —
and what he himself has been trying to do for more than twenty
years now. Is it not “suspicious” that the one very thing Gouldner
has spent his life doing as a sociologist should also turn out to
be, as he declares, the same thing that is happening, objectively,
out there in the world of sociology at large? Is it not possible, there-
fore, that Gouldner’s report of what he has seen in the world of
sociology is “merely” a projection of his own ambitions, a fantasy-
fulfillment of his own wishes, a justification of his own values, and,
indeed, of his own existence? I readily admit this is quite possible.
Yet, without stopping here, we must also go on and ask: Suppose
this to be true — what does it mean?

Does it mean that what Gouldner has said about the world of
sociology and the trends in it has necessarily been distorted or
falsified by his own experience with it, his activity in it? I believe
not. For, surely men may be led to truth no less than tc falsehood
by their socially shaped personal experiences in the world. Indeed,
there is no other way in which they can approach truth. Surely
truth, no less than error, must be born of social experience.
Whether or not any work presents us with reality or illusion cannot
be determined by knowing the life that the thinker has led. In the
end, this can be appraised only by looking at the work alone and
not at the life; the work can be judged only in terms of standards
appropriate to it, and by seeing how well it bears up under criticism.

But if neither the truth nor the falsity of this, or of any other,
work can be judged by understanding its rooting in the lives and
times of those who produced it, why bother to locate a work in this
manner? The answer, of course, is that we do not want only to
appraise the truth-value of any work, but we also wish to under-
stand it. That is, we seek to understand why it has taken one

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 4S3

direction rather than another, pursued one problem and ignored
others, accented certain parts of social life but neglected others,
and been formulated in this but not in other ways. Throughout
this study, one of Gouldner’s efforts, my efforts, has been to under-
stand social theories and theorists, which is to say, to understand
the work and the men who crystallize the “collective conscience" of
the sociological community and provide it with self-awareness. The
task here is essentially the same as that undertaken in Enter Plato.
The present study, like Enter Plato, is a case study of social theo-
rists; its ultimate objective is to contribute to a more general theory
about social theorists, which may illuminate the manner in
which theory-products and theory-performances are generated and
received.

My own conception as to how social theory is actually made is
very different in its central vision from that conventionally em-
phasized by those methodologists who stress the interaction of
theory and research. Most generally, I believe that it is impossible
to understand how social theory is actually made, or how it makes
its way in the world, in terms of an assumption that one-sidedly
stresses the role of rational and cognitive forces and that tends to
prejudge what is essentially an empirical question, subordinating it
to a methodological morality.

Starting with the very primitive assumption that theory is made
by the praxis of men in all their wholeness and is shaped by the
lives they lead, and pursuing this into concrete empirical contexts,
one is led to a very different conception of what generates social
theory and of what it is that many theorists are trying to do. Having
pursued this conception, one is better abie to see just how complex
a communication social theory really is. It is a complexity that
cannot even be glimpsed, let alone grasped, if we fail to see the
ways in which theorists are entrenched in their theories.

Most of the theory-work and many of the major shifts in social
theory examined here simply were not occasioned by the theorists’
needs to assimilate the reliable facts painstakingly yielded by
rigorously designed social research. Nor, very often, did theorists
seem much interested in preparing the groundwork for future
research. Indeed, questions of fact — that is, concern with what
the facts are — seem to enter surprisingly little into much social
theory’; at any rate, they seem to have far less importance for
theory-making than the methodologists and logicians of science
suggest. Perhaps one reason for this is that most such methodol-
ogies and logics have been shaped largely by what may well be
the very’ different experience of the physical sciences and that they
may not, for this reason, well apply to or describe the behavior of
social theorists.

484 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

It often seems that the making of social theory can get under-
way, and be sustained, only when questions of fact are deferred
or ignored. In other words, social theorists frequently take certain
“facts” as given. They do so because these “facts” have often been
yielded by their personal experience rather than research; rooted
in this personal reality, they believe in them utterly. The theorist
becomes involved in, sees, and experiences such things as the
French Revolution, the rise of socialism, the Great Depression of
1929, or a new world of advertising and salesmanship. These “facts”
are not problematic to him in their factuality; the reliability of
what he sees is not, so far as he is concerned, in question. The
important issue is not the determination of the facts, but rather
the ordering of them. Social theorizing, then, is often a search for
the meaning of the personally real, that which is already assumed
to be known through personal experience. Basing itself on the
imputed reality of the ordinarily experienced, much of theory-work
begins with an effort to make sense of one’s experience. Much of
it is initiated by an effort to resolve unresolved experience; here,
the problem is not to validate what has been observed or to produce
new observations, but rather to locate and to interpret the meaning
of what one has lived.

Commonly, the social theorist is trying to reduce the tension
between a social event or process that he takes to be real and
some value which this has violated. Much of theory- work is initiated
by a dissonance between an imputed reality and certain values, or
by the indeterminate value of an imputed reality. Theory-making,
then, is often an effort to cope with threat; it is an effort to cope
with a threat to something in which the theorist himself is
deeply and personally implicated and which he holds dear.

SOCIAL WORLDS, PERMITTED
AND UNPERMITTED

We might suggest that, to a theorist, there are two kinds of social
worlds: permitted (or “normal”) worlds, and unpermitted (or
“abnormal”) ones. The theorist often begins after he sees (or
perceives the possibility of) an unpermitted world. Some part of
his theory-work constitutes an effort to transform an unpermitted
into a permitted world and thus normalize his universe: he must
eliminate or reduce the threat of the unpermitted, or strengthen

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 4S5

and fortify the permitted. Theorists thus tacitly seek to effect a
discovery; namely, the conditions under which unpermitted worlds
can be transformed into permitted ones or under which permitted
worlds can be prevented from becoming unpermitted.

Generally speaking, we might suggest that two of the most im-
portant ways in which the theorist does this are, first, by com-
municating the importance, necessity, or potency, as well as the
goodness and value, of what he takes to be a normal world; and,
second, by denying, deprecating, or ignoring the potency or value
of what he takes to be an unpermitted world. For example, in
Parsons’ analysis of "evolutionary universals,” with its more than
implicit counterposing of the United States and the Soviet Union,
each of these is (for Parsons) a paradigm, respectively, of a
permitted and of an unpermitted world. Much of Parsons’ theory
here and throughout the larger body of his work is animated by an
impulse to bolster both the potency and moral worth of the per-
mitted world and to deny these to the unpermitted; to endow
the first with immortality, and to eliminate the second.

We may postulate, as Charles Osgood does, that the entire world
of social objects has certain fundamental coordinates, certain
latitudes and longitudes, and that men locate all social objects in
a multidimensional attribute-space in terms, most crucially, of
good-bad and potency-weakness dimensions. This implies that the
impulse to assign meaning to social objects will, at a minimum,
entail judgments concerning both their goodness and their potency.
It also implies that, insofar as social theorizing is engaged in
mapping meanings, it too is engaged in assigning objects to places
along the goodness and potency dimensions. If we assume, as we
must, that social theorists are fundamentally like other men, then
we must also assume that, whatever their professions of being
“value-free,” they too assign meanings to social objects not only in
terms of their potency, but also in terms of their goodness.

In a scientific, “value-free" social theory, it is not that the theorist
fails to situate his social objects along a good-bad dimension, but
only that this assignment, having been conventionally defined as
irrelevant to his task, is now defocalized and done covertly rather
than being openly accomplished. Yet, if given subsidiary attention
only, it continues to function actively, nonetheless. In short, the
pressure to situate social objects in terms of their moral value
abides and shapes the work of social theorists, whatever their
professed conception of their technical role.

Value judgments may, for example, come to be secreted in
judgments of potency of power: social objects to which potency is
assigned are tacitly held to be good things. (Thus, for example,
while Parsons’ major focus on shared moral values is one that

486 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

stresses their sheer potency — by emphasizing the sheer difference
that they produce in the social world — and while he rarely makes
an explicit judgment about the sheer goodness of such values
there can be no doubt that Parsons believes that they are not only
potent but also good.) This tendency, however, is only one special
case of a larger set of cases, namely, a general tendency to define
■permitted social worlds as, among other things, those in which
power and goodness are positively correlated. Such a correlation
is a general condition of all permitted social worlds. Correspond-
ingly, unpermitted worlds are those where (1) good objects are
seen to be weak, or ( 2 ) bad objects are seen to be strong.

It is my suggestion that a significant part of social theorizing is
a symbolic effort to overcome social worlds that have become un-
permitted and to readjust the flawed relationship betweeen good-
ness and potency, restoring them to their “normal” equilibrium
condition, and/or to defend permitted worlds from a threatened
disequilibrium between goodness and potency. With the Depression
of 1929, for example, the middle and upper classes were increas-
ingly seen as incompetent and callous powers in society; that is,
they were seen as potent but immoral, and their authority was
undermined even though their power remained. When Parsons
strives to show that these classes are becoming increasingly “pro-
fessionalized,” what he is stressing is that they behave with a moral
sense of collective responsibility. He is, thereby, acting theoretically
to re-equilibrate power and goodness.

It is as extremely painful and threatening for a man to believe
that what is powerful in society is not good, as it would be for a
religious believer to feel that his God was evil. The tensions of
such unpermitted worlds, however, need not be reduced only by
tacitly assigning “goodness” to the powerful, but may also take
place in other ways. One of the most common of these is to demean
or to forbid the making of any judgment in terms of the goodness
dimension, while accentuating the importance of making judg-
ments in terms of potency. Machiavellianism — a Machtpolitih or
a Rcalpolitik — exemplifies this tendency within the political realm;
a value-free conception of social science does much the same in
the realm of sociology.

If we recall that modem sociology was crystallized in the
Positivistic period, it is plain that the “fathers” of Academic
Sociology had no doubt about the ultimate potency of the industrial
society that they then saw emerging, but had many doubts about
its goodness or morality. They thus, at once, declared that there
was a need for a new morality and religion. More than that, they
offered science in general and social science in particular as a way
of discovering a new morality and of legitimating the new middle

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 487

class and its institutions. Despite their growing power, the new
middle class had appreciable difficulty in getting other social strata,
indeed almost all other social strata — whether the old aristocracy,
the new working class, or the intellectuals — to view them as fully
rightful incumbents of social power. The middle class has con-
tinued to live with this abiding tension between its established
potency and its challenged goodness.

Theorists may accommodate to such unpermitted worlds by
intimating the goodness of the powerful; this is essentially what
the Functionalist does by showing that those social objects that
survive have an ongoing “usefulness,” for, in our world, to be useful
is to be good. Again, theorists may accommodate to unpermitted
worlds by stressing the potency of the good, as Parsons does in
emphasizing the empirical importance of shared moral norms.
Accommodation may also be sought be declaring certain kinds of
judgments — specifically, value judgments — to be out of bounds or
beyond one’s competence, as value-free sociologists do. A value-free
conception of the social sciences is one way in v'hich Academic
Sociologists may accommodate to living in an unpermitted world;
for, within such a value-free conception, sociologists are allowed to
say that it is not their task to restore the equilibrium between power
and goodness, thus permitting them to accommodate to a power
that they themselves may deem of dubious morality.

This last strategy is essentially a way to ayoid the tension by
denying one’s responsibility for coping with it. Avoidance, however,
may employ a rather different strategy. One may simply omit
reference to. or deprecate the empirical importance or statistical
frequency of. unpermitted worlds or unpermitted states of the
world. Thus, the significance or prevalence of sheer powder, force,
coercion, conspiracy, or violence in the world has long been ignored
or deprecated by liberal sociologists, who, to this day, have scarcely
ever confronted the problem of war, either empirically or theo-
retically. Parsons tells us that he is, at last, going to confront the
problem of power, but, as we saw, he is able to do so only by tacitly
redefining power as authority; in short, he can confront power only
by anointing it with rightful legitimacy. It may seem as if he has
talked of power, but he has not. Indeed, in this respect, neither
Goffman, Garfinkel, nor Homans seems very different. All com-
monly avoid intellectual confrontation with the reality of sheer
power. To most Academic Sociologists power without legitimacy is
an embarrassing, dissonance-generating aberration. A world in
which power exists without legitimacy will not, they usually stress,
long survive. In effect, this is not so much a report on what they
have found, but a form of reassurance. Academic Sociologists mani-
fest the common impulse to bring power and goodness into some

488 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

equilibrium. In a social world in which men "doubt that the powerful
are the good, avoidance of the reality of power is a dissonance-
reducing strategy as fundamental as the avoidance of value-judg-
ments, with the result that, in the end, the sociology thus warped
loses as much in its empirical realism as it does in moral sensitivity.

The foregoing remarks, focusing on the response to a dissonance
between power and goodness as a theory-shaping force, have been
intended only to exemplify the very different perspective .on theory-
making that arises when one starts with the assumption that theory
is made by a man in all his wholeness, and then pursues this
assumption seriously. It is, to repeat, intended only as an example
of the productivity of such a standpoint; it was not intended to
assign any exceptional significance to the power/goodness dis-
sonance in comparison with other forces, or to enumerate the
variety of theory-shaping forces mentioned in the course of my
work here; and it was certainly not intended to present a systematic
social theory about the extra-scientific forces at work in social
theory. The presentation of that theory will have to wait for a later
work; what we have in the present volume is but a case study in
preparation for the ultimate undertaking.

My concern with a theory of social theories is only one part of
a more encompassing outlook; in particular, it is a part of a larger
commitment to a “sociology of sociology.” For while social theory
is vital to the development of sociology as a whole, it is just one
element in its intellectual apparatus; this intellectual apparatus is,
moreover, only a part of sociology seen as a social and cultural
system. To secure an intelligible perspective on the present volume,
therefore, I must attempt to outline the larger whole of which it is
but a segment and to exhibit briefly the conception that I have of
a more general “sociology of sociology.” Since I do not believe that
there is one and only one sociology of sociology, I shall signal my
distinctive conception of it by giving it a distinctive name; I shall
call it “Reflexive Sociology.” The following account of Reflexive
Sociology will, in effect, be the framework within which I shall
strive to indicate the domain assumptions underpinning the present
study.

TOWARD A REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY

Sociologists are no more ready than other men to cast a cold eye on
their own doings. No more than others are they ready, willing, or
able to tell us what they are really doing and to distinguish this

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 489

firmly from wliat they should be doing. Professional courtesy stifles
intellectual curiosity; guild interests frown upon the washing of
dirty linen in public; the teeth of piety bite the tongue of truth. Yet,
first and foremost, a Reflexive Sociology is concerned with what
sociologists want to do and with what, in fact, they actually do in
the world.

The intellectual development of sociology during the last two
decades or so, especially the growth of the sociologies of occupa-
tions and of science, is, when fused with the larger perspectives
of the older sociology of knowledge, one promising basis for the
development of a Reflexive Sociology. We have already seen some
of the first stirrings of a Reflexive Sociology, in one form or another.
Indeed, I believe we have already also seen the emergence of
defensive reactions that, in effect, seek to contain the impact of
a Reflexive Sociology by defining it as just one other technical
specialty within sociology.

What sociologists now most require from a Reflexive Sociology,
however, is not just one more specialization, not just another topic
for panel meetings at professional conventions, 1 and not just
another burbling little stream of technical reports about the socio-
logical profession’s origins, educational characteristics, patterns of
productivity, political preferences, communication networks, nor
even about its fads, foibles, and phonies. For there are ways and
ways of conducting and reporting such studies. There are ways
that do not touch and quicken us but may, instead, deaden us to
the disorders we bear,- by allowing us to talk about them with a
ventriloquist’s voice, they only create an illusion of self-confronta-
tion that serves to disguise a new form of self-celebration. The
historical mission of a Reflexive Sociology as I conceive it, however,
would be to transform the sociologist, to penetrate deeply into his
daily life and work, enriching them with new sensitivities, and to
raise the sociologist's self-awareness to a new historical level.

To the extent that it succeeds in this, and in order to succeed in
it, a Reflexive Sociology is and would need to be a radical sociology.
Radical, because it would recognize that knowledge of the world
cannot be advanced apart from the sociologist’s knowledge of him-
self and his position in the social world, or apart from his efforts
to change these. Radical, because it seeks to transform as well as
to know the alien world outside the sociologist as well the alien
world inside of him. Radical, because it would accept the fact that
the roots of sociology pass through the sociologist as a total man,
and that the question he must confront, therefore, is not merely
how to work but how to live.

The historical mission of a Reflexive Sociology is to transcend
sociology as it now exists. In deepening our understanding of our

49° Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

own sociological selves and of our position in the world, we can, I
believe, simultaneously help to produce a new breed of sociologists
who can also better understand other men and their social worlds.
A Reflexive Sociology means that we sociologists must — at the very
least — acquire the ingrained habit of viewing our own beliefs as
we now view those held by others.

It will be difficult for many sociologists to accept that we pres-
ently know little or nothing about ourselves or other sociologists
or, in point of fact, that we know little about how one piece of
social research, or one sociologist, comes to be esteemed while
another is disparaged or ignored. The temptation is great to con-
ceal our ignorance of this process behind a glib affirmation of the
proprieties and to pretend that there is no one here but us scientists.
In other words, one of the basic reasons we deceive ourselves and
lie to others is because we are moral men. Sociologists, like other
men, confuse the moral answer with the empirical and, indeed,
often prefer it to the empirical. Much of our noble talk about the
importance of “truth for its own sake" is often a tacit way of saying
that we want the truth about others, at whatever cost it may be to
them. A Reflexive Sociology, however, implies that sociologists must
surrender the assumption, as wrongheaded as it is human, that
others believe out of need while we believe — only or primarily —
because of the dictates of logic and evidence.

A systematic and dogged insistence upon seeing ourselves as we
see others would, I have suggested, transform not only our view
of ourselves but also our view of others. We would increasingly
recognize the depth of our kinship with those whom we study. They
would no longer be viewable as alien others or as mere objects for
our superior technique and insight; they could, instead, be seen as
brother sociologists, each attempting with his varying degree of
skill, energy, and talent to understand social reality. In this respect,
all men are basically akin to those whom we usually acknowledge
as professional “colleagues,” who are no less diversified in their
talents and competence. With the development of a Reflexive
Sociology that avoids becoming molded into just another technical
specialty,' such rigor as sociology attains may be blended with a
touch of mercy, and such skills as sociologists possess may come
to yield not only information but perhaps even a modest measure
of wisdom.

The development of a Reflexive Sociology, in sum, requires that
sociologists cease acting as if they thought of subjects and objects,
sociologists who study and “laymen” who are studied, as two dis-
tinct breeds of men. There is only one breed of man. But so long as
we are without a Reflexive Sociolog)', we will act upon the tacit

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 491

dualistic premise that there are two, regardless of how monistic our
professions of methodological faith.

I conceive of Reflexive Sociology as requiring an empirical
dimension which might foster a large variety of researches about
sociology and sociologists, their occupational roles, their career
“hangups,” their establishments, power systems, subcultures, and
their place in the larger social world. Indeed, my emphasis on the
empirical character of a Reflexive Sociology and my insistence
that the methodological morality of social science not be confused
with the description of its social system and cultures, may seem to
express a Positivistic bias. Yet while I believe that a Reflexive
Sociology must have an empirical dimension, I do not conceive
of this as providing a factual basis that determines the character
of its guiding theory. Which is to say that I do not conceive of
the theory of a Reflexive Sociology merely as an induction from
researches or from “facts.” And more important, I do not conceive
of these researches or their factual output as being “value-free,” for
I would hope that their originating motives and terminating con-
sequences would embody and advance certain specific values. A
Reflexive Sociology would be a moral sociology.

Perhaps this can be adumbrated by clarifying my conception of
the ultimate objective or goal of a Reflexive Sociology, in regard to
both its theory and its researches. The nominal objective of any
scientific enterprise is to extend knowledge of some part of the
world. The difficulty with this conception, however, resides in the
ambiguity of its core notion, namely, “knowledge.” This ambiguity
is of long standing, especially in the social sciences, where it has
been particularly acute. Although expressible in different ways, this
ambiguity will be formulated here as meaning that knowledge
may be, and has been, conceived of as either “information” or
"awareness.”

Since the nineteenth century, when a distinction was formulated
between the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the cultural or
human sciences, on the other, this implicit ambiguity in the meaning
of “knowledge” was imported into the social sciences and has re-
mained at the core of certain of its fundamental controversies.
Those believing that the social sciences were a “natural” science,
like physics or biology, took an essentially Positivistic view, holding
that they should be pursued with the same methods and objectives
as the physical sciences. They largely conceived of knowledge as
“information,” as empirically confirmed assertions about “reality,”
whose scientific value derived from their implications for rational
theory and whose larger social value derived from technologies
based upon them. In short, science thus construed aimed at pro-

49 2 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

ducing information, either for its own sake or to enhance power
over the surrounding world : to know in order to control.

So long as this was a conception of the physical (as distinct
from the social) sciences, it was an ideology (i) behind which all
"humanity” might unite in a common effort to subdue a “nature”
that was implicitly regarded as external to man, and ( 2 ) with
which to promote technologies that could transform the universe
into the usable resource of mankind as a whole. Such a conception
of science was based upon an assumption of the essential unity
and the common interests of mankind as a species. It was also a
tacitly parochial conception of the relationship of the human
species to others; it postulated humanity’s lordship over the rest
of the universe and its right to use the entire universe for its own
benefit, a right tempered only by the species’ expedient concern for
its own long-range welfare. If such a view of science was an ex-
pression of the unthinking ethnocentrism of an expanding animal
species, it was also an historical summit of this species’ idealism;
limitations were ignored in the flush of an optimistic sense that the
newly realized universalism of science constituted an advance over
narrower and more ancient parochialisms — and so it was.

The humanistic parochialism of science, with its premised unity
of mankind, created problems, however, when the effort was made
to apply science to the study of mankind itself. It did so pardy
because national or class differences then became acutely visible,
but also, and perhaps more important, because men now expected
to use social science to “control” men themselves, as they were
already using physical science to control “nature.” Such a view of
social science premised that a man might be known, used, and
controlled like any other thing: it “thingafled” man. The use of
the physical sciences as a model fostered just such a conception of
the social sciences, all the more so as they were developing in the
context of an increasingly utilitarian culture.

This view of the social sciences was fostered by French Posi-
tivism. In opposition to it, largely under German auspices and the
Romantic Movement with its full-scale critique of utilitarian cul-
ture, there emerged a different conception of social science. This
required a different method, for example, verstehen, clinical in-
tuition, or historical empathy — an inward closeness to the object
studied rather than an antiseptic distance from it, an inward com-
munion with it rather than an external manipulation of it. This
conception of social science held that its ultimate goal was not
neutral “information” about social reality, but rather such knowl-
edge as was relevant to men’s own changing interests, hopes, and
values and as would enhance men’s awareness of their place in the
social world rather than simply facilitating their control over it.

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 493

In this conception of social science both the inquiring subject
and the studied object are seen not only as mutually interrelated
but also as mutually constituted. The entire world of social objects
is seen as constituted by men, by the shared meanings bestowed
and confirmed by men themselves, rather than as substances eter-
nally fixed and existent apart from them. The social world, there-
fore, is to be known not simply by “discovery” of some external
fact, not only by looking outward, but also by opening oneself
inward. Awareness of the self is seen as an indispensable avenue to
awareness of the social world. For there is no knowledge of the
world that is not a knowledge of our own experience with it and our
relation to it.

In a knowing conceived as awareness, the concern is not with
“discovering” the truth about a social world regarded as external to
the knower, but with seeing truth as growing out of the knower’s
encounter with the world and his effort to order his experience with
it. The knower’s knowing of himself — of who, what, and where he
is — on the one hand, and of others and their social worlds, on
the other, are two sides of a single process.

Insofar as social reality is seen as contingent in part on the
effort, the character, and the position of the knower, the search
for knowledge about social worlds is also contingent upon the
knower’s self-awareness. To know others he cannot simply study
them, but must also listen to and confront himself. Knowing as
awareness involves not a simple impersonal effort of segmented
"role players,” but a personalized effort by whole, embodied men.
The character and quality of such knowing is molded not only by
a man’s technical skills or even by his Intelligence alone, but also
by all that he is and wants, by his courage no less than his talent,
by his passion no less than his objectivity. It depends on all that
a man does and lives. In the last analysis, if a man wants to change
what he knows he must change how he lives; he must change his
praxis in the world.

Knowing as the pursuit of information, however, conceives of
the resultant knowledge as depersonalized; as a product that can
be found in a card file, a book, a library, a colleague, or some other
“storage bank.” Such knowledge does not have to be recallable by
a specific knower and, indeed, does not have to be in the mind of
any person; all that need be known about it is its “location ” Knowl-
edge as information, then, is the attribute of a culture rather than
of a person; its meaning, pursuit, and consequence are all deperson-
alized. Knowledge as awareness, however, is quite another matter,
for it has no existence apart from the persons that pursue and
express it. Awareness is an attribute of persons, even though it
is influenced by the location of these persons in specific cultures or

494 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

in parts of a social structure. A culture may assist or hinder in
attaining awareness, but a culture as such cannot be aware.

Awareness entails a relationship between persons and infor-
mation; yet information, while necessary to, is not sufficient for
awareness. Awareness turns on the attitude of persons toward in-
formation and is related to their ability to hold onto and to use
information. The crux of the matter is that information is rarelv
neutral in its implication for men’s purposes, hopes, or values.
Information, therefore, tends to be experienced — even if not ex-
pressly defined — as either “friendly” or “hostile,” as consonant or
dissonant with a man’s purposes. It is the relation of information
to a man’s purposes, not what it is “in itself,” that makes informa-
tion hostile or friendly. News of the stability of a government is
hostile information to a revolutionary but friendly to a conservative.
An openness to and a capacity to use hostile information is aware-
ness. Awareness is an openness to bad news, and is born of a
capacity 7 to overcome resistance to its acceptance or use. This is
inevitably linked, at some vital point, with an ability to know and
to control the self in the face of threat. The pursuit of awareness,
then, even in the world of modern technology, remains rooted in
the most ancient of virtues. The quality of a social scientist’s work
remains dependent upon the quality of his manhood.

Whether ‘hostile information” refers directly to some state of
the larger world itself, or, rather, to the deficiencies of an estab-
lished, perhaps technical, system of information about the world,
an openness to it always requires a measure of self-knowledge
and courage. The self of a scholar may be as deeply and personally
invested in his work on information systems as is a revolutionary’s
on a political system. Both have conceptions of their work that
may, at some point, be maintained only through the blunting of
their awareness. A politician’s capacity to accept and use hostile
information about his own political efforts and situation is often
referred to as his “realism.” A scholar’s ability to accept and use
hostile information about his own view 7 of social reality, and his
efforts to know 7 it, is part of what is usually called his “objectivity.”

As a program for a Reflexive Sociology, then; this implies that:
(i) The conduct of researches is only a necessary 7 but not a
sufficient condition for the maturation of the sociological enterprise.
What is needed is a new praxis that transforms the person of the
sociologist. (2) The ultimate goal of a Reflexive Sociology is the
deepening of the sociologist’s own awareness, of who and what he
is, in a specific society at any given time, and of how 7 both his social
r-'le and his personal praxis affect his work as a sociologist. (3) Its
..ork seeks to deepen the sociologist’s self-aw 7 areness as well as
his ability to produce valid-reliable bits of information about the

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 495

social vrorld of others. (4) Therefore, a Reflexive Sociology re-
quires not only valid-reliable bits of information about the world
of sociology, and not only a methodology or a set of technical skills
for procuring this . It also requires a persistent commitment to the
value of that" awareness which expresses itself through all stages of
work, as well as auxiliary skills or arrangements that will enable
the sociologists self to be open to hostile information.

Conventional Positivism premises that the self is treacherous
and that, so long as it remains in contact with the information
system, its primarv effect is to bias or distort it. It is assumed, there-
fore, th2t the wav to defend the information system is to insulate
it from the scholar’s self by generating distance and by stressing
impersonal detachment from the objects studied. From the stand-
point of a Reflexive Sociolog}', however, the assumption that the
self can be sealed off from information systems is mythological.
The assumption that the self affects the information system solely
in a distorting manner is one-sided: it fails to see that the self may
also be a source both of valid insight -that enriches study and of
motivation that energizes it. A Reflexive Sociology looks, therefore,
to the deepening of the seifs capacity to recognize that it views
certain information as hostile, to recognize the various dodges that
it uses to deny, ignore, or camouflage information that is hostile
to it, and to the strengthening of its capacity to accept and to use
hostile information. In short, what Reflexive Sociology seeks is not
an insulation but a transformation of the sociologist’s self, and
hence of his praxis in the world.

A Reflexive Sociology, then, is not characterized by tr hat it
studies. It is distinguished neither by the persons and the problems
studied nor even by the techniques and instruments used in study-
ing them. It is characterized, rather, by the relationship it estab-
lishes between being a sociologist and being a person, between the
role and the man performing it. A Reflexive Sociology embodies a
critique of the conventional conception of segregated scholarly roles
and has a vision of an alternative. It aims at transforming the
sociologist s relation to his work.

Since the 1920’s when American sociology began to be institu-
tionalized within universities, it has held firmly to one operating
methodological assumption, despite the other changes it has under-
gone. This assumption can be called “Methodological Dualism.”
Methodological Dualism focuses on the differences between the
social scientist and those whom he observes; it tends to ignore
their similarities by taking them as given or by co nfinin g them to
the sociologist’s subsidiary attention. Methodological Dualism calls
for the separation of subject and object, and it views their mutual
contact with concern and feax. It enjoins the sociologist to be

496 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

detached from the world he studies. It warns him of the dangers of
“over rapport.” It sees his involvement with his “subjects” primarily
from the standpoint of its contaminating effect upon the informa-
tion system.

Methodological Dualism is based upon a fear; but this is a fear
not so much of those being studied as of the sociologist’s own self.
Methodological Dualism is, at bottom, concerned to constitute a
strategy for coping with the feared vulnerability of the scholar’s
self. It strives to free him from disgust, pity, anger, from egoism
or moral outrage, from his passions and his interests, on the sup-
position that it is a bloodless and disembodied mind that works
best. It also seeks to insulate the scholar from the values and
interests of his other roles and commitments, on the dubious
assumption that these can never be anything but blinders. It
assumes that feeling is the blood enemy of intelligence, and that
there can be an unfeeling, unsentimental knower. Methodological
Dualism is, in fine, based on the tacit assumption that the goal of
sociology is knowledge conceived as information. Correspondingly,
it serves as a powerful inhibitor of the sociologist’s awareness, for
it paradoxically presupposes that the sociologist may rightfully be
changed as a person by everything except the very intellectual
work which is at the center of his existence. In effect. Methodo-
logical Dualism prohibits the sociologist from changing in response
to the social worlds that he studies and knows best; it requires
him to finish his research with the same self, the same biases and
commitments, as those with which he began it.

Methodological Dualism is based on the myth that social worlds
are merely “mirrored” in the sociologist’s work, rather than seeing
them as conceptually constituted by the sociologist’s cognitive com-
mitments and all his other interests. The Methodological Dualist
commonly conceives his goal to be the study of social worlds in
their "natural” or uncontaminated state. In effect, he says, like the
photographer, “Don’t mind me; just be natural, carry on as if I
were not here.” What this ignores, however, is that the reaction
of the group under study to the sociologist is just as real and reveal-
ing of its “true” character as its reaction to any other stimulus,
and, furthermore, that the sociologist’s own reaction to the group
is a form of behavior as relevant and significant for social science
as is anyone else’s. There is not as great a difference between the
sociologist and those he studies as the sociologist seems to think,
even with respect to an intellectual interest in knowing social
worlds. Those being studied are also avid students of human re-
lations; they too have their social theories and conduct their
investigations.

Believing that he should not influence or change the group he

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 497

studies — except in those limited ways that he plans during experi-
mentation — the sociologist would also like to believe that he does
not. He prefers to believe that he is what he should be, according to
his methodological morality. He thus commonly fails to attend to
the ramifying range of influences that he actually exerts upon so-
cial worlds and, to that extent, he obscures what, in point of fact,
he does and is. The notion that research can be "contaminated”
premises that there is research that is not contaminated. From the
standpoint of a Reflexive Sociology, however, all research is “con-
taminated,” for all are conducted from the standpoint of limited
perspectives and all entail relationships that may influence both
parties to it.

Methodological Dualism entails a fantasy of the sociologist’s God-
like invisibility and of his Olympian power to influence — or not
influence — those around him, as he pleases. In contrast, the
Methodological Monism of a Reflexive Sociology believes that
sociologists are really only mortal; that they inevitably change
others and are changed by them, in planned and unanticipated
ways, during their efforts to know them; and that knowing and
changing are distinguishable but not separable processes. The aim
of the Reflexive Sociologist, then, is not to remove his influence on
others but to know it, which requires that he must become aware
of himself as both knower and as agent of change. He cannot know
others unless he also knows his intentions toward and his effects
upon them; he cannot know others without knowing himself, his
place in the world, and the forces — in society and in himself — to
which he is subjected.

Methodological Dualism stresses the “contamination” possible in
the research process itself; it sees the main danger to “objectivity”
in the interaction between those studying and those studied. In
effect, this is the narrow perspective of an interpersonal social psy-
chology that ignores the biasing effects of the larger society and the
powerful influences it exerts upon the sociologist’s work through
the intervening mechanism of his career and other interests. What
Methodological Dualism ignores is that the sociologist does not
only enter into consequential relations with those whom he studies,
but that these relations themselves operate within the orbit of the
relations that the sociologist has with those who, directly or in-
directly, finance his researches and control his occupational life
and the establishments within which he works. In ignoring these
larger influences. Methodological Dualism in effect boggles at a
gnat but swallows a camel. Its claim to ‘"objectivity” is, in effect,
commonly made in such a way as to give least offense to those who
most subvert it.

A Reflexive Sociology, for its part, recognizes that there is an in-

49$ Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

evitable tendency for any social system to curtail the sociologist's
autonomy in at least two ways: to transform him either into an
ideologue of the status quo and an apologist for its policies, or into
a technician acting instrumen tally on behalf of its interests. A
Reflexive Sociology recognizes that the status quo often exerts such
influences by the differential rewards — essentially, research fund-
ing, academic prestige, and income-earning opportunities — that it
selectively provides for scholarly activities acceptable and useful to
it. The most fundamental control device of any stable social system
is not its use of crude force, or even of other, nonviolent forms of
punishment, but its continuing distribution of mundane rewards.
It is not simply power that an hegemonic elite seeks and uses, but
an authority that is rooted in the readiness of others to credit its
good intentions, to cease contention when it has rendered its deci-
sion, to accept its conception of social reality, and to reject alterna-
tives at variance with the status quo.

The most effective strategy possessed by any stable social system
and its hegemonic elites to induce such conformity is to make it
worthwhile. What elites prefer is not craven expedience, but pious
opportunism. Conformity with the basic principle of establishment
politics — that is, accepting the image of social reality held by the
hegemonic elite or at least one compatible with it — is, however,
nothing less than a betrayal of the most fundamental objectives of
any sociology. The price paid is the dulling of the sociologist’s
awareness; it is a surrender in the struggle to know those social
worlds that are and those that might be.

Reflexive Sociology, then, rests upon an awareness of a funda-
mental paradox: namely, that those who supply the greatest re-
sources for the institutional development of sociology are precisely
those who most distort its quest for knowledge. And a Reflexive So-
ciology is aware that this is not the peculiarity of any one type of
established social system, but is common to them all. While a
Reflexive Sociology assumes that any sociology develops only under
certain social conditions which it is deeply committed to know, it
also recognizes that elites and institutions seek something in return
for the support they provide sociology. It recognizes that the devel-
opment of sociology depends on a societal support that permits
growth in certain directions but simultaneously limits it in other
ways and thus warps its character. In short, every social system is
bent upon crippling the very sociology to which it gives birth. A
claim to "objectivity” made by a sociology that does not acknowl-
edge this contradiction, and \Vhich lacks a concrete understanding
of the manner in which its own hegemonic institutions and elites
are a fundamental danger to it, is a tacit testimonial to the success-
ful hegemony of that system over that sociology. It evidences a

Toward a Reflexive Sociology ^gy

failure to achieve that very objectivity to which it so proudly pledges
allegiance.

A Reflexive Sociology can grasp this hostile information: all the
poiuers-that-be are inimical to the highest ideals of sociology. At
the same time, it further recognizes that most often these are not
external dangers, for they produce their most powerful effect when
allied with the dispositions and career interests internal to sociolo-
gists themselves. A Reflexive Sociology is fully aware that sociology
is most deeply distorted because and when the sociologist himself
is a willing party to this. A Reflexive Sociology therefore prefers
the seeming naivete of “soul-searching” to the genuine vulgarity of
“soul-selling.”

Insofar as a Reflexive Sociology focuses on the problem of deal-
ing with hostile information, it confronts the problem of a “value-
free” sociology from two directions. On the one hand, it denies the
possibility and, indeed, questions the worth of a value-free sociol-
ogy. On the other hand, it also sees the dangers, no less than the
gains, of a value-committed sociology; for men may and do reject
information discrepant with the things they value. It recognizes
that men’s highest values, no less than their basest impulses, may
make liars of them. Nonetheless, a Reflexive Sociology accepts the
dangers of a value commitment, for it prefers the risk of ending in
distortion to beginning in it, as does a dogmatic and arid value-free
sociology.

Again, insofar as a Reflexive Sociology centers on the problem
of hostile information, it has a distinctive awareness of the ideologi-
cal implications and political resonance of sociological work. It
recognizes that under different conditions an ideology may have
different effects upon awareness; it may be liberating or repressive,
may increase or inhibit awareness. Moreover, the specific problems
or aspects of the social world that an ideology can make us aware
of also change over time. A Reflexive Sociology must, therefore,
have an historical sensitivity that alerts it to the possibility that
yesterday’s ideologies may no longer enlighten but may now blind
us. For since hostile information entails a relation between an in-
formation system and the purposes of men, ivhat is hostile will
change with the changing purposes that men pursue and with the
changing problems that their pursuit encounters under new condi-
tions. What was formerly hostile information may cease to be so;
and what was hitherto friendly may become hostile. Thus, for a
part of the middle class — the new "swinging” middle class — as the
“sexual revolution” has progressed, Freudianism has ceased to be
the liberating force it once was. Furthermore, insofar as Freudian-
ism becomes part of a larger movement that interprets social and
political dissent as symptomatic of mental illness, it increasingly

500 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

becomes an instrument of social control and begins to play a
sociologically repressive role.

Similarly, the “good news” and the liberating effects of the
scientific revolution may now also need to be seen as an historically
limited liberation. What is now required is to confront that hostile
information which suggests that the scientific revolution has, under
present social conditions, opened the prospect of global self-
destruction and, more generally, that science has become an instru-
ment through which almost all contemporary industrial social
systems maintain themselves. What made Nazi Germany blind
was, among other things, its irrational racial ideology; but what
made it uniquely dangerous and destructive was its effective mo-
bilization of modern science and technology on behalf of this. This
was an extreme case; but it is far from the only instance in which
modern societies use science as an instrument of domination, in
much the same way that rulers of the “ancient regimes” of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries once used institutional reli-
gion. Despite this, however, the conventional Western view of
science is still largely that of the Enlightenment, seeing it as a
source of cultural liberation and human welfare that is marred only
occasionally, marginally, accidentally.

SOCIOLOGY AND TIIE LIBERAL TECJINOLOGUES

In a similar vein, the liberal ideologies shared by most American
sociologists were, prior to World War II, a source of enlightening
awareness. Today, however, in the context of a burgeoning Welfare-
Warfare State, these liberal ideologies serve instead to increase the
centralized control of an ever-growing Federal Administrative
Class and of the master institutions on behalf of which it operates.
Liberal sociologists have thus become the technical cadres of
national governance. Here, in the post-World War II period, there
has been a marriage of the sociologist’s liberalism and his career
interests. Its eager offspring is the liberal technologue who pro-
duces information and theories that serve to bind the poor and the
working classes both to the state apparatus and to the political
machinery of the Democratic Party, while, at the same time, help-
ing the national bureaucracy to unmask the inept, archaic local
bureaucrats and to subject them to control from the national center.

Under the banner of sympathy for the underdog, the liberal

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 501

technologues of sociolog)’ have become the market researchers of
the Welfare State, and the agents of a new managerial sociolog)’.
While sometimes moved by a humane concern for the deprived and
the deviant, the liberal technologues of sociolog)’ are creating, in
effect, a new “ombudsman sociology” whose very criticism of
middle-level welfare authorities and establishments serves as a
kind of lightning rod for social discontent, strengthening the cen-
tralized control of the highest authorities, and providing new instru-
ments of social control for the master institutions. The liberal tech-
nologues in sociolog) - present and experience themselves as men
of good will who work with and for the Welfare State only because
they want to relieve the distress of others within the limits of the
“practicable.” They say nothing about the extent to which their
accommodation to this state derives from the personal bounty’ it
provides them.

If it is often said, and truly, that most American sociologists
today regard themselves as “liberals,” it also has to be added that
the character of liberalism has changed. No longer is it the con-
scientious faith of an embattled minority fighting a callous estab-
lishment. Liberalism today is itself an establishment. It is a central
part of the governing political apparatus. It has a powerful press
whose pages distort the truth just as systematically as does the
conservative one. The liberal establishment of the Welfare State
has its heroes whose virtue may not be slighted with impunity, and
it has its myths whose distortions may not be challenged without
reprisal. Like any establishment, the liberal establishment rewards
the lies that sustain it and punishes the truths that embarrass it.

As a part of the liberal establishment, liberal sociologists are
expected to defend the cause. In short, there are times when they
are expected to he. In return, they are allowed to share in the
career-battening support of the social service and the research
funding supplied by the Welfare State. It has become the essential
role of the sociologist-as-liberal-technologue to foster the optimistic
image of American society as a system whose major problems are
deemed altogether soluble within existent master institutions, if
only enough technical skills and financial resources are appropri-
ated. It has, in other words, become the function of the “sunshine
sociologist” to assure American society that the cloudy glass of
water is really safe rather than dangerous to drink.

American sociolog)' is manned increasingly by men of liberal
ideology who are allied with, consultants to, and celebrants and
dependents of, the Welfare State. At the same time, however, many
of them have a genuine distaste for American policy abroad. One
way in which some accommodate to this anomalous condition is
by splitting their image of the American State apparatus. They tend

5°- Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partialiv

to conceive of it as composed of two separate parts: a benign and
humane Welfare State, on the one side, and a malign, imperial-
istic Warfare State, on the other hand. In short, they assume
that the Welfare State is not organically linked with the Warfare
State, in one Welfare-Warfare State. They are, therefore, prone to
regard the Warfare State and its reactionary foreign policies as if
these were isolated anachronisms, having no significant connection
with the domestic reform policies of the Welfare State.

Because they do this, these sociologists are unable to come to any
serious understanding of the interrelation of domestic and foreign
policy, of the manner in which both are interdependent, and of
how both relate to the crisis in the society’s master institutions.
Yet the sociological unity of the Warfare and Welfare State, the
integration of foreign and domestic policies, is thoroughly visible
on the political level, where both policy strands come together in
the machinery of the Democratic Party. For the Democratic Party
has been, par excellence, the unifying agent forging both the wel-
fare and the warfare sides into a single coin. It has been the party
of active imperialistic adventures abroad, on the one side, and of
welfare legislation, on the other. The alliance of the liberal tech-
nologue with the Welfare State through the Democratic Party,
therefore, cannot help but be an alliance with the Warfare State.

In this specific historical context, it is the liberal establishment
and its political ideology that is most responsible for blunting the
awareness of American sociologists. The ideological distortion of
American sociology does not derive, in any appreciable measure,
from conventionally conservative or reactionary — to say nothing
of radical — commitments. The development of American sociology,
the deepening of its awareness, therefore, is now primarily con-
tingent upon dissociation from the Bismarckian policies that pass
for liberalism today. The historical mission of a Reflexive Sociolog)'
is to foster a critical awareness of the character of contemporary
liberalism, of its hold upon the university and upon American
sociology, as well as of the dialectic between Welfare and Warfare
policies, and of the liberal sociologist’s role as market researcher
on the behalf of both. Reflexive Sociology' premisses that the char-
acter of any sociology is affected by its political praxis and that
further development of sociology now requires its liberation from
the political praxis of liberalism.

Toward a Reflexive Sociology

503

REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY AND RADICAL SOCIOLOGY

It is, in some part, because I have serious reservations about the
historically limited, elite-distorted character of traditional human-
ism that I have stressed that a Reflexive Sociology requires a radical
character. To say that a Reflexive Sociology is radical does not
mean, however, that it is only a nay-saying or a “critical sociology”;
it should be just as much concerned with the positive formulation
of new societies, of utopias, in which men might live better, as it
is concerned with a criticism of the present. To say that it is a
sociology critical of the present does not mean that it merely entails
elitist criticism of mass culture or the evils of television, or even of
the foreign or domestic policies of government. It wants to know
how these are shaped by the given power matrix and by the in-
stitutionally entrenched elites and classes.

Moreover, a radical sociology is not simply a criticism of the
world "out there.” The acid test of a radical sociology is not its
posture (or its posturing) about matters remote from the sociolo-
gist's personal life. The quality of its radicalism is as much revealed
by its daily response to the commonplace vices of the everyday
surround, as it is by its readiness to pass resolutions that denounce
imperialism and to sign petitions that seek to remedy mass depriva-
tion.

The man who can voice support for “Black Power” or who can
denounce American imperialism in Latin America or Vietnam, but
who also plays the sycophant to the most petty authorities in his
university, is no radical; the man who mouths phrases about the
need for revolutions abroad, but who is a coiled spring ready to
punish the rebels among his own graduate students, is no radical;
the academician who with mighty oaths denounces the President of
the United States, but subserviently fawns upon his Department
Chairman, is no radical; the man who denounces opportunistic
power politics, but practices it daily among his university col-
leagues, is no radical. Such men are playing one of the oldest
games in personal politics; they are seeking to maintain a creditable
image of themselves, while accommodating to the most vulgar
careerism. Such men are seeking neither to change nor to know the
world; their aim is to grab a piece of it for themselves,
pends on its ability to resist all merely authoritative definitions

The integrity of a radical, and hence a Reflexive Sociology de-
of reality, and it is most authentically expressed in resisting the

504 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes— Partially

irrationalities of these authorities met daily in eye-to-eye encounter
A Reflexive Sociology insists that, while sociologists desperately
require talent, intelligence, and technical skill, they also need a
courage and valor chat may be manifested every day in the most
personal and commonplace decisions. Something of what this
means in a university context is suggested by Karl Loewenstein’s
personal appreciation of Max Weber:

He could not hold his peace. In all the eight years that I knew him
he was forever involved in scholarly and political feuds which he waged
with implacable intensity. ... He had an innate and inflexible sense
of justice that made him take the side of anyone whom he thought was
being unjustly dealt with . 2

The core of a Reflexive Sociology, then, is the attitude it fosters

toward those parts of the social world closest to the sociologist his

own university, his own profession and its associations, his pro-
fessional role, and importantly, his students, and himself — rather
than toward only the remote parts of his social surround. A Re-
flexive Sociology is distinguished by its refusal to segregate the
intimate or personal from the public and collective, or the everyday
life from the occasional "political" act. It rejects the old-style closed-
office politics no less than the old-style public politics. A Reflexive
Sociology is not a bundle of technical skills; it is a conception of
how to live and a total praxis.

REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY AS A WORK ETHIC

As a work ethic , a Reflexive Sociology affirms the creative potential
of the individual scholar, which it opposes to the conformity de-
manded by established institutions, by professional organizations,
by university gentility, and by culturally routinized roles. It opposes
the inherent tendency of any professional role to become standard-
ized and to be ridden with the smugly self-satisfied. A Reflexive
Sociology repudiates the tendency of professionals to prefer the
sure thing, with its modest and steady rewards, to the high-variance
bet. It prefers men with a capacity for intellectual risk-taking and
with the courage to compromise their careers on behalf of an idea.
In truth, a Reflexive Sociology is concerned more with the creativity
than the reliability of an intellectual performance: it shuns the
domestication of the intellectual life.

A Reflexive Sociology, as a work ethic, speaks against all pedes-

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 505

trian and indifferent performances. It detests the impulse to trans-
form all intellectual tasks into impersonal routines, the impulse
which, after all, is at the center of sturdy, “sober” professionalism.
It insistently demands from a thinker all the freshness and serious-
ness of response of which he is capable. A Reflexive Sociology
knows how very little it takes to be a respected member of an estab-
lished profession; it knows that pyramids of respect are often
erected on a semblance of sobriety and conformity rather than
intellectual quality and achievement. And always and everywhere,
it warns the individual scholar that there is a crucial difference
between himself and his profession; that his profession has a kind
of immortality, while he himself is only mortal. He must speak his
own piece here and now, mobilize all the resources of creativity
that he has, and use all of himself, whether or not it fits neatly into
the standardized requirements of his professional role.

When men fall spellbound before the demands of cultural pre-
scriptions, when they fail to heed their own inner impulses, fail to
know their own special bents or aptitudes, fail to grasp that there
are many valuable ways they can live and contribute as scholars,
it is then that their lives must be tragic. Men may escape tragedy,
when they recognize that they need not allow themselves to be
assimilated to their cultural masks; when they insist on the differ-
ence between themselves and their roles; when they insist that it
is they who are the measure and who do the measuring: one man
with, or one man against, other men, and not one man against the
standards of culture and the requirements of roles.

To do this, men must accept their own unique talents, varying
ambitions, and experience of the world, as authentic. If they find
these are distant from the requirements of their culture and role,
they should, at least, face up to if not accept the difference. They
must consider the possibility that their personal experiences, im-
pulses, and special talents have as much right to be heard as the
cultural norms, while all the while granting the possibility that they
may simply be in the wrong business. When ordinary men can do
this, they need no longer be inescapably burdened by a sense of
their own failure and inadequacy. When great men can do this,
they need no longer project an inflated image of themselves as
gods. When ordinary and great men can do this, they will both
recognize the value of their human contribution as sufficient to
justify their lives.

Men surmount tragedy when they use themselves up fully, when
they use what they have and what they are, whatever they are and
wherever they find themselves, even if this requires them to ignore
cultural prescription or to behave in innovating ways undefined by
their roles. The tragic sense does not derive from the feeling that

506 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

men must always be less than history and culture demand; it de-
rives, rather, from the sense that they have been less than they
could have been, that they have needlessly betrayed themselves
needlessly forgone fulfillments that would have injured no one. The
sociological enterprise, like others, becomes edged with a tragic
sense when men suspect that they have wasted their lives. In con-
fining work to the requirements of a demanding and unfulfillable
paradigm, sociologists are not using themselves up in their work
and are, indeed, sacrificing, leaving unexpressed, certain parts of
themselves — their playful impulses, their unverified hunches, their
speculative imagination.

When sociologists commit themselves compulsively to a life-
wasting high science model, they are making a metaphysical wager.
They are wagering that the sacrifice is “best for science.” Whether
this is really so, they cannot confirm; but they often need no
further confirmation than the pain this self-confinement inflicts
upon them. My point, of course, is not that a sociologist can live
without making such a metaphysical wager, but rather that various
wagers are possible. He may bet that the paradigm or model of
science presently prescribed is more right and trustworthy than his
own “errant” impulses. In short, he may bet against himself. He
may, however, bet on himself. That is, he may trust his own
individuating impulses, personal experiences, unique aptitudes,
and all the fainter powers of apprehension (as Gilbert Murray
called them) with which these endow him. To say that the sociolo-
gist need not make only one kind of bet, however, is not to say
that the number of bets he can make is unlimited. If the basic
problem is how to link himself as a person with the requirements
of his role as a sociologist, there would seem to be, for sociologists
as for others, a limited number of solutions.

The culturally standardized role of the sociologist, like any other
social role, can be thought of as a “bridge” — both facilitating and
limiting, enabling men to “overcome” certain obstacles at the price
of limiting what “other side” they may achieve. Social roles, further-
more, are always unfinished, invariably incomplete bridges; they
reach out only part way across the void. It is their incompleteness
that is the eternal problem, and thus even those who respect the
bridge can never entirely rely upon it to get them safely across.

There are a limited number of attitudes one can adopt toward
this situation. For example, a man can say: So be it; if this is the
way of bridges, then we must learn to live with them, imperfect
though they be. He may, thereafter, parade back and forth along
the completed section of the bridge, sometimes dangling his feet
over the unfinished edge, looking down. Another man, however,
may say: We must be grateful for whatever we have and, repaying

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 507

those who built it, we must continue working, each adding his own
n\odest plank to the unfinished end; occasionally resting at the
edge, he may dangle his feet over it. In both cases, however, one
is bound to have something of a tragic sense, a sad whimsical wish
that things were not like that.

But there is still another possibility. A man might feel that one
thing is certain: while the building of this bridge will never be
completed, his life will surely have its end. A man might therefore
risk a running leap from the unfinished edge to the shore that he
thinks he sees ahead. Perhaps he has seen right and has estimated
his own powers correctly. In which event, applause. Perhaps he has
badly miscalculated, on both counts. In which event, a certain
dampness sets in. Maybe he can swim back to safety, even if some-
what less than applauded. In any event, he has found out how far
he can see and how well he can jump. Even if he is never heard
from again, perhaps those who are still dawdling at the edge will
learn something useful.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY: A SLIPPAGE

A Reflexive Sociology is an historically sensitive sociology, as it
must be; for, to deepen the awareness of sociologists, it must, in
part, offer them an awareness of themselves, of their own histori-
cally evolving character, and of their place in an historically evolv-
ing society. It sees all men as profoundly shaped by their shared
past, by their evolving cultures and social systems. Yet it does not
see men either as the helpless agents of some inexorable social
force to which they must bow, or as the omnipotent overlords of
an historical process that they can neatly engineer. A Reflexive
Sociology believes that there is an inevitable “slippage” between
man and society.

A large part of this slippage between man and society, as well as
between man and history, derives from man’s character as a
biological creature and as an evolving animal species. Man’s unique
character is embedded in a species nature that endows him with
the tissue, organ, and chemical potentiality for both reason and
passion; each of these is rooted in his animal nature. Each of these
sides of man is both limited and strengthened by the other. Without
the chemistry of passion man would be a computer; without the
symbolic powers of reason he would be a “naked ape.” Man’s ca-

5°S Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partial] v

parity for creativity, sociability, and solidarity, on the one hand, as
well as for mutual destructiveness and aggression, on the other,
are both as much embedded in his animal passions as thev are
uniquely shaped by his reason and symbol-making powers. No
animal with man’s enormous powers of reason can be wholly
vicious or mindless of the needs of others; and no animal with
man’s highly charged, ever-ready potential for sexual arousal can
be wholly reasonable or compliant. Those who want man totally
amiable and controllable had best geld him. We must not confuse
man’s need for sociality with a single-minded impulse toward
amiable sociability.

If the historically evolved needs of society set limits within
which men must seek their survival and development, men’s own
individual and species needs also set limits with which any society
must, in its w r ay, come to terms. Men do not only seek to satisfy
wants that they have learned in society or that their “culture has
taught them.” They strive also to fulfill their own individual and
species potentialities, and they seek fulfillment no less than tension-
reduction. In this view r , then, society is made by and for the human
species, as much as man is made by and for society. The species
uses the given society so long as it satisfies human needs and
increases man’s ability to fulfill himself. The human species and
its various societies are not wedded until death do them part. In
time, they come to confront one another as antagonists; then, as
often before, the species puts aside the society it has created and
moves on.

From the viewpoint of much of the sociology dominant in the
United States today, it is not man but society that is the measure.
This conception of sociology and of society once had value, because
it stressed the extent to which men are shaped by an environment
of other men, are dependent upon one another, suffer from or take
pleasure in one another; because it stressed that men are not simply
the slaves of natural, biological, or geographical forces. This view
of man and society was, once, a benign antidote, at least when
devoid of medieval nostalgia, to the individualistic and competitive
bourgeois culture crystallizing in the nineteenth century. Today,
however, the context is a growingly bureaucratized, centralized,
and committee-shackled Welfare-Warfare State. So, this sociology’s
inherent subordination of the individual to the group serves, not
so much as a reminder to men of their debt to one another, but as
a rationale for conformity to the status quo, for obedience to estab-
lished authority, and for a restraint that makes haste slowly; it
becomes a warning about limits rather than an invitation to pursue
opportunities.

If a Reflexive Sociology rejects the. imperialistic ideology of men

Toward a Reflexive Sociology 509

who seek to dominate a universe that they tacidy view as “theirs,”
at the same time this sociology also recognizes that there are some
provinces within that universe that properly are or should be men’s,
and that these are the provinces of culture and society. Thus a Re-
flexive Sociology has, as a central part of its historical mission, the
task of helping men in their struggle to take possession of what is
theirs — society and culture — and of aiding them to know who they
are and what they may want.

From the standpoint of a Reflexive Sociology, men live in society,
but not there alone; they live in history, but not there alone. In-
dividual men do live out the cycle of their existence, pursue their
careers, and establish their families within encompassing civiliza-
tions, cultures, and societies. The concerns and interests of men
do, in large part, derive from and coincide with these larger enti-
ties; but they do so, however, only in part and never in toto. How-
ever deep men’s identification with and dependence upon a larger
cause or group, and however successful the cause or however
benign the group, there are always points in the lives of men when
they must go their own ways, when it becomes painfully evident
that their cause and their group do not constitute the totality of
their personal existence.

Central to this disparity between biography and history is the
fact that men die. There is an ongoing and irreducible tension be-
tween the passion with which we can surrender ourselves to our
social commitments and the fact that death can, at any moment,
remove us totally and eternally from these same involvements. At
moments, the inconceivable permanence of death becomes con-
ceivable, and our single-minded social involvements may suddenly
appear as radically ephemeral as a child's game. There are the
quiet moments when we glimpse that, to lie for money, to do vio-
lence for power, to inflict hurt for love, are as insane as killing an
opponent just to beat him at chess. Yet if we flee or withdraw from
passionate commitment, if we refuse to take it seriously, we sur-
render our destinies to the control of those who do. We must be
involved, then, because a “sad necessity” constrains us; but we may
be involved gladly, to the extent that we struggle against an in-
humane existence and that, in this struggle, we achieve a sense of
our own pow r ers and worth, and aid others to do the same. The very
ephemerality of things makes it more, not less imperative to w r age
a struggle to fulfill the limited existence that men have.

A Reflexive Sociology, however, insists on the reality of these
different levels on which men live — on the reality of the difference
between society or collective history, and individual biography —
and it recognizes that men are compelled, openly or tacitly, to con-
front this difference and to assign some meaning to it. Conven-

510 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

tional Academic Sociology is based upon a metaphysic that blunts
awareness of this. A Reflexive Sociology, though, insists upon the
reality of these different levels and of the tensions among diem. It
sees that history, culture, and society never exhaust biography,
that everywhere men live with the “loose ends” of an existence that
they are constantly striving to pull together.

In some measure this effort at integration was once the task of
religion. Western religions sought, among other things, to bridge
the different levels of existence by affirming their common origin
in and governance by a Supreme Being. As the traditional religions
broke down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, science
came increasingly albeit surreptitiously to serve as an integrating
philosophy of life. Instead of seeing man, society, and species as
part of a God-created whole, science sought to integrate existence
by tacitly premising the unity and the hegemony of the human
species. Instead of placing God at the ideological center of gravity,
it placed man and society. From this standpoint the rest of the
universe was an empire that stood waiting to be claimed, con-
quered, and exploited for man’s advantage. Presumably, it was
there to be known, and it was to be known in order that it might be
used. Science, in fine, sought to unify human experience by sanc-
tioning and empowering the imperialism of the human species, and
by dangling before men the promise of undreamed riches born of
its new power. It may be that, underlying the world of science-
fiction, or, for that matter, the recent scientific efforts to scan the
universe for signals of intelligence elsewhere, mankind has begun
to have a vague sense of the grim deficiencies of human ethno-
centrism: the suspicion that homo sapiens is not alone in the uni-
verse is a suspicion that the universe may not be ours. It is part of
the absurdity of our time that the world of science fiction may
sometimes be based upon a more humane ethic — if not a sounder
perception of “reality” — than the world of social science.

REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY LOOKS AT ITSELF

This conception of a Reflexive Sociology outlines those domain
assumptions that I know I hold and which have inevitably informed
my discussion of social theory. Yet it is only one such statement,
and- is similar to others that are now emerging among other social
scientists. It is, I believe, one of the varied signs of an impending

Toward a Reflexive Sociology - n

transformation in the social sciences. All of these, however, mani-
fest a common concern with deepening the social scientist's self-
awareness and his praxis, which often takes the form of an effort
to construct a sociolog)- of sociology. Why does such an cifort
emerge today? What are the conditions under which there now
emerges an expressed need for a reconstruction of sociology— for
both a critique and a reconstruction of conventional Academic
Sociolog)- are implicit in the movement toward a sociologv of soci-
ology. Can a sociology of sociology, or a Reflexive Sociolog)- as one
version of this, account for itself?

While, at this juncture, I can do no more than venture a guess
about this, I suspect that these new trends in sociology implv a
growing detachment from the sociology once conventional in the
United States. What is it that fosters such a detachment? It derives
partly, I suspect, from the growing detachment of sociologists and
others from the larger society in which they work and live, and, at
the same time, from their mounting awareness of the ways in
which their sociology is becoming inextricably integrated into this
very society. That is, alienation from the larger societv would not,
of itself, have disposed sociologists to a critique of their own disci-
pline and its establishments, did they not feel that the latter were
entangled with the larger society. But as their discipline and its
establishments become increasingly supported by and openly in-
volved with the Welfare State; as sociologists wing their way back
and forth between their universities and the centers of power; as
they are heard ever more frequently in the councils of power; and
as their most immediate work environments — the universities them-
selves — become drawn into the coalescing military-industrial-wcl-
fare complex, it becomes unblinkingly evident that sociology has
become dangerously dependent upon the very world it has pledged
to study objectively.

This dependence is dissonant with the ideal of objectivity. It be-
comes ever more difficult for the sociologist to conceal from himself
that he is not performing as he had pledged, that he is not who he
claimed he was, and that he is becoming more closely bound to
the system from which he had promised to maintain his distance.
A crisis is emerging in sociology today, not merely because of larger
changes in society, but because these changes are transforming the
sociologist’s home territory, his own university base. “Corruption" is
now not something that one can pretend is going on only "out there"
in the base world surrounding the university, or something that one
reads about only in the newspapers; it has become all too evident
in the eye-to-eye encounter of daily life in the college corridor.
A man may begin to move away from others of his own land when
he no longer takes pride in his likeness to them.

512 Epilogue: The Theorist Synthesizes — Partially

The older or classical “sociology of knowledge" arose, we mi^ht
say, in response to a very special experience and the special per-
sonal reality it generated: the experience of the intellectual dis-
tortions subtly produced by c/ass-rooted differences in political
ideology. The older sociology of knowledge was rooted in the aware-
ness that intellectuals or academic men could be shaped, could be
informed or deformed, by these other, these "alien” involvements
of the scholar. A Reflexive Sociolog}’ or a sociolog}’ of sociology,
however, is based on a somewhat different kind of experience; one
that warns that it is not only forces external to the intellectual life,
but also those internal to its own social organization and embedded
in its distinctive subculture, that are leading it to betray its own
commitments. It is based upon an awareness that the academician
and university are not simply put upon by the larger world, but are
themselves active and willing agents in the dehumanizing of this
larger world. The unpermitted world has all too plainly penetrated
the once seemingly protected enclave and the enclave itself has
come increasingly to be seen as an unpermitted world.

This crisis cannot be resolved by retreating to traditional concep-
tions of a “pure” sociology. This is so, if for no other reason than
that the world outside the university will not leave it alone, and
because, for good reasons and for bad, the world inside the uni-
versity does not want to be left alone. Sociology today has “suc-
ceeded,” at least in its worldly ambitions, only too well; in “arriving”
it discovers that its new success threatens it with an ancient
failure. The new, self-critical conceptions of sociology and the
growing detachment from “normal” Academic Sociology are part
of a search for escape from the pressures and temptations of the
world that surrounds and penetrates the university; but, at the
same time, they also press toward a new self-image and an his-
torical mission that would enable sociology to act humanely in the
larger world. They seek to retain their new found potency without
surrendering their older values. Of the many who hear the call to
this new mission for sociology only those 'will be “chosen” who
understand that there is no way of making a new sociology without
undertaking a new praxis.

NOTES

1. Maurice R. Stein has made me particularly aware of this danger.

2. Karl Loewenstein, Max Webers Political Ideas in the Perspective of our
Time, R. and C. Winston, trans. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1966), p. 100.

5 M

Argyris, Chris, on research and social
control, qt„ 50
Aristotle, 241, 262
armaments, 81
Aron, Raymond, 115
artists, 75, 80, 99, 400
arts, 75, 91, 102, 115
Asch, S. A., 221
authenticity, 423-425
authoritarianism, and social account-
ing, 49-50

authority, 243, 261, 294, 487
authorship, of social theory product,

46-47

automation, 289

awareness, 492-495. 496, 497, 498,
499, 502, 507

background assumptions, 29-30, 148;
as beliefs, 32; domain of, 31, 32, 33,
34, 35, 36-37, 37-40, 46, 47-48,
51-54; learning of, 32-33; linguistic
categories, 33; normative and exis-
tential, 32, 38; of social theorists,
34-35; stereotypes, 32, 33; tacit,
390-395; and world hypotheses,
30-31, 33

Baudelaire, C. P., on bourgeoisie, qt.,

Bazard, Saint-Amand, 24, 101, 112
Becker, Howard, 444
Belgium, social sciences in, 345
beliefs, as background assumptions,
32, 36, 43; factuality of, 41-42; need
for, 95, 97, 98
Bell, Daniel, 79

Bendix, Reinhard, on franchise in
U.S., qt., 49

Bentham, Jeremy, 108, 109, no, in,
406

Berger, Bennett, 384
Bimbaum, Norman, on crisis in
Marxism, qt., 451
Black colleges, and sociologists, 9
Black liberation, 3, 399, 408
Black Power, 399, 503
Blacks, 289, 295, 298, 322, 349, 399,
400, 442; and education 359; and
ghettos, 76; progress of, in U.S., 49;
and voting rights, 49; and White
hostility, 48
Blalock, Herbert, 347
Blau, Peter, 378; on autonomy of or-
ganizations, qt., 51 ; social exchange
theory, 395

Bonald, Louis de, 106, 153
Boulding, Kenneth E., 157
Brandes, George, on Christianity, qt.,
97

Brinton, Crane, on Pareto cult, 149

Index

Bukharin, Nicolai, 114, 158, 448
bureaucracy, 40, 44, 50, 52, 119, i 37>
142, 154, 179, 180-181, 183, 188,
277, 280, 320, 344, 389, 399, 407,
442, 500; as evolutionary universal,
364

Burke, Kenneth, 396
Burns, Tom,~i58

business men, as professionals, 154-
157

Cabet, fitienne, 99, 125
Capital, 203

capitalism, 9, 122, 138, 155, 255, 302,
304, 434; critique of, 178-182; and
functionalism, 331-332; vs. Marx-
ism, 108-111; moral element, 184;
perfectability of, 182-185; pessi-
mistic view of, 180, 181, 182, 183,
195; rationality of, 180-181
careerists, in sociology, 15-16, 17, 18,
503

categorical exhaustiveness, 208—209
Catholic Church, 95, 96-97, 98, 99,
107, 255, 332, 412
causality, 346-347
charity, 72
Chartism, 298

China (mainland), 279; Marxism in,
45i

Christianity, 255, 276; and democracy,
255; vs. Marxism, 256-257; and
social progress, 255-257; in utilitar-
ian culture, 62, 65-66, 67, 69-70,
79; and Welfare State, 255-256
civil rights movement, 399, 427
classical sociology, 189; anomie, 118,
137; and anthropology, 117, 120-
i2i; comparative approach, 117,
120, 130, 178-179; derivation of
functionalism, 119; division of
labor, 122-123; evolutionism, 117,
118, 119, 120, 178-179, 181, 182,
183, 184; industrialism, 116, 119,

122, 123, 131, 132; vs. Marxism,
1 1 6, 136-138, 447; and middle
class, 116; morality, 118, 121-122,

123, 124, 387-388; religion, 134-
135; secularization, i34~ I 35; vs -
socialism, 136-138; sociology of
religion, 134, 140; sources of, 116;
syndicalist corporation, 118, 343;
and the university, 135-136

clergy, 75

codification, 17, 18, 265
cognitive judgment, 65, 66, 67, 84
cognitive validity, 12-13
Cohen, Albert, on U.S. society, qt., 49
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 9, 406, 45 2 : on
social theory, qt., 5

Index

Cohn-Bendit, Gabriel, 406
Coleman, James, 460
college, and upward mobility, 289
colonialism, 120, 130, 131, 132, 144,
349

Columbia University, and sociology,
22, 172; student rebellion, g, 10
Communist Manifesto, 363
communitarian counter-culture, 285
complementarity, 240, 241-242, 243,
304, 309, 310

Comte, Auguste, 24, 88, 92, 94, 99,
101, 102, 107, in, 112, 113, 114,
117, 119, 120, 134, 135, 151, 153,
226, 230, 249, 250. 252, 253, 259,
260, 261, 275, 320, 332, 346, 357,
361, 422, 445, 455, 456, 457, 466,
473; Order and Progress, 106, 119,
249; similarity to Parsons, 205-206
Comtian formula, 112
concrete sociology, 158, 461, 473, 474
conflictual validation, 221, 222
conformity, and moral codes, 234-
236, 237-239, 424-425, 428-430,
435; and tension, 235-236
conscience, 329, 387; collective, 128,
196, 283, 423; liberty of, 114, 252
consensual sociology, 261
consensual validation, 221, 222; of
radical sentiments, 8; of theory, 30,
45

consensus, in social theory, 17, 18
consequences, calculation of, 65, 66,
67, 68, 69, 70, 72

conservatism, 251, 253, 331-337, 344,
437

continuity, 48, 265; and Positivism,

17, 18

convergence, 17, 18, 265

counter-culture, 5, 285

counter society, 399, 401

criminality, 93, 286

crisis: of Academic Sociology, 370,

373, 436, 437. 443, 445; function-
alism, 341-342, 351, 369-370, 373-

374. 375, 410, 412, 436, 437. 450;
of Marxism, 341-342, 450, 451,
452-455; international, 144-145;
social, 80, 195-197; in social theory,
34; of sociology, 34-35, 510-512; of
Western sociology, 341-342, 410

Cuba, Marxism in, 451
cultural lag, 91-92, 105-106, 107,
113, 117, 118, 129, 184, 249; theory
of, in Soviet sociology, 47
cultural obsolescence, of social theory,
8

culture, concept of, 52, 53. 54; coun-
ter, 5, 285; and sociology, 4, 11-12;

515

of poverty, 8; shock, 23-. vs. social
systems, 224-225
cumulation, 17, 18, 265
cybernetics, 346, 445. 474
Czechoslovakia, invasion of, 463

Dahrendorf, Rail, 37S
Davis, Kingsley, 89, t6S, 421, 45O
death and social theory, 432-434, 509
decision theory, 346
"Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen," 70, 71, 308
democracy, 49; as evolutionary uni-
versal, 364; and science, 69
Democratic Party, 500, 502
depression ( see Great Depression)
detachment, 98, 112, 172, 175, 193.
275.495,5U

determinisms, 189, 190-191, 192, 194,
195. 213-214; and capitalism, 181-

182, 183

deviance, 237, 238, 2S6, 425-428. 429
differentiation, social, 357-3O1
disequilibrium, 233. 234
divorce, 93

domain assumptions, 31, 32, 33, 34,
35. 46. 47-48, 207, 241. 352, 353,
355, 388, 401, 413, 415, 421, 448.
454; and autonomy of social struc-
ture, 51-54; concerning Negroes,
32, 37, 38; factor analysis of, 36-
37; and generation gap, 39; and
prejudices, 32, 33; and research
methodology, 49-51 ; and senti-
ments, 37-40

dramaturgy, social theory of, 378-390,
406, 444
drugs, 391, 442

Durkheim, Emile, 67, 89, 92, 1 J2, 1 14.
117, 118, 119, 120, I2i, 122, 123,
128, 129, 130, 135, 136, 137. 140.
144, 148, 150, 157. 178, 179. 182.

183, 191, 196, 212, 230, 241 . 248-
251, 252, 254. 263, 272, 273. 2S3.
331, 335. 342. 343, 356. 373-374.
390, 420, 422, 423, 426. 437. 447;
critique of inheritance, 117-118

dysfunction, 336-337. 346, 414-415.
417-418, 422

Eastern Europe: Academic Sociology
in, 27, 447, 451. 462-463; function-
alism in, 455-458, 459- industriali-
zation, 455, 458; sociological insti-
tutes, 476-477

economics, of scarcity, 430, 43*
Economy and Society, 305
education, 288, 289
Ego- Alter model, 212-231, 220. 231-
233, 234-235. 236, 237, 239, 240,

5*6

Ego-Alter ( cant’d , )

241, 242, 247, 267-272, 305, 306,
307

elites, 52, 55, 62, 80, 90, 95, 99. 105,
106, 107, 112, 115, 117, 121, 146,
154. 157. 160, 174, 252, 254, 287,
289, 292, 344, 350, 439, 467, 468,
470, 475, 498, 503; vs. masses, 421,
430, 436; power, 313-320, 322, 359,
360; in U.S., 313-320, 322
Enfantin, Barthelemy Prosper, • 24,
101, 113

Engels, Frederich, 113, 150, 185, 189,
263, 450; on social evolution, 363-
368

England, functional anthropology in,
126-134; and functional sociology,
125-126

environment, and social theory, 47
equality, 253, 421-422, 435; of oppor-
tunity, 288, 303, 320
equilibrium analysis, 456; see also
system equilibrium
eternal form, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418,
433

Ethical Culture, 259
ethics, in Marxism, 457, 472
ethnic groups, 93

ethnomethodology, 7, 390-395, 444
evil, assumptions about, 417-4x8,
419,422

evolutionary prerequisites, 364-368,
453

evolutionary universals, 362, 363, 365,
366, 367. 485

“Evolutionary Universals in Society,"
362, 434

evolutionism, 117, 118, 119, 120, 126-
127, 129, 130, 156-157, 178-179,
181, 182, 183, 184, 357, 361, 362-
368, 436

exchange social theory, 395-396
existential assumptions, 32, 38
exploitation, 123-124, 181, 239-240,

242, 304

Fable of the Bees , 66
factor analysis, of domain assump-
tions, 36-37

facts, and theories, 42-43, .483-484,
49 i

family, 93, 303, 304, 311, 312, 391;

in social evolution, 365, 366
Fanon, Frantz, 384
Febvre, Henri Le, 115
feudalism, 62, 63, 64, 65, 100, 119
Feuerbach, L. A., 134, 263, 365
Fiedler, Leslie, on characteristics of
student rebels, qt., 9, 10
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 300

Index

Flaubert, G., on bourgeoisie, qt., 63
force, 286, 290, 292, 293, 294, 295,
310,487
Ford, J., 174
Foucalt, Michel, 177
Fourier, C., 99
France, communism in, 452
franchise, 297-298, 300
Frankfurt, radical demonstration, 6;
school of critical sociology, 5-6]
12,113,409,450
Franklin, Benjamin, 66
free enterprise, 255, 348, 367
free love, 100, 107
free will, 190
freedom, 253

French Revolution, 17, 52, 63, 89, 95,
98, 114, xi6, 125, 440, 484
Freud, S., 38, 79, 115, 247, 355 , 426,
429, 499

Fromm, Erich, 113

functional autonomy, 215-216, 223,

225, 226, 227

functionalism, 6, 48, 117, 133, 341,
342, 508; and Academic Sociology,
6, 14, 17, 24, 26; businessmen as
professionals, 154-157; capitalism,
331 - 332 ; and causality, 346-347;
classical sociology, 119; conserva-
• tive nature of, 251, 253, 337, 344,
437; convergence with Marxism,
334 , 335 , 352, 368-370, 402, 4x0,

436, 443 , 454 - 455 , 472, 473 - 475 ,
482; crisis of, 341-342, 352, 369-
370, 373 - 374 , 375 , 4x0, 412, 436,

437, 450, 510-512; crisis of inter-
national middle class, 144-145;
division of labor, 250; dysfunction-
alism, 336-337, 346; in Eastern
Europe, 455-458, 459 ; xn England,
125-126; entropy of, 159-160, 374-
376, 410; equality, 253; evolution-
ism, 156-157; exploitation, 123-
124; Fascism-Nazism, 144; freedom,
253; functional anthropology, 129-
130; Grand Social Theory, 151, 153,
420; Great Depression, 138, 141,
142, 144-145, 146, 147, 148, 434 ,
484, 486; industialism, 107-108,
249, 2,50-251, 331, 332, 436; in-
fluence of Marxism, 447, 448-449;
influence on Marxism, 448-449,
470-471; infrastructure, 114, 443 ;
infrastructure, antiquity of, 435 -
437; interdependence, doctrine of,

226, 346-347, 421; Keynesion, 443 ,
444; legitimacy, of moral codes,
273—274; liberty of conscience, 252;
and Marxism, 138, 144, X49-151;
micro-functionalism, 380; and mid-

Index

die class, 121, 123. 126, 144, 154-
155; morality, 139, 140, 141, 142,
143. 247-248, 248-251, 251-254,
254-257. 264, 267-272, 274, 275-
276, 343, 457. 458; morality, vs.
power, 154, 358-359; and New Left,
400-402, 410; optimism of, 147-
148, 350, 419; and popular utilitar-
ianism, 124; private property, 250,
304; professionalism, 154-157, 486;
relevance, 146-147; and religion,
254-257, 260-262; religiosity, 258-
259; religious character of, 260-
262, 262-266; Romanticism, 121,
138-139, 140; sanctions, and moral-
ity, 273; scarcity, and morality,
278-281; science, 154-155, 156,
265-266; sentiments, 113; social
change, theory of, 351-353, 353-
354, 368-370; and social engineer-
ing, 152-153; social order, 145-
147, 157, 252-253, 281, 283, 331,
335, 336; social-problem solving,
345-357; social stratification, 253;
social utilitarianism, 138, 139-140,
333; society, as social system, 142,
143; and sociological Positivism,
1x3-114, 115, 320; sociology of
moral values, 140-141; spiritual
values, 253; and the state, 343;
theory construction, 152-153; and
utilitarianism, 121, 122, 123; and
utility, 120-121, 139, 487; as value
free, 333-337; voluntarism, 138,
39, 140, 141, 143, 156; and Welfare
State, 160-162, 333, 342-344, 344-
351, 369, 410. 445, 449, 458; see
also Parsonsian functionalism

gainful employment, 74-75

Gans, Eduard, ibi

Garaudy, Roger, 451

Garfinkel, Harold, 159, 162, 410, 487;

ethnomethodology, 7, 390-395, 444
generation gap, 39
German Ideology, 109, 185, 365
Glazer, Nathan, 79
"God is dead,” 66, 79, 254, 261, 275,
277

Goethe, J. W. von, 103
Goffman, Erving, 159, 162, 169, 287,
39i, 392, 393, 395, 396, 408, 410,
487; dramaturgical social theory,
378-390, 409, 444
Goldman, Lucien, 158
good, vs. evil, 418-419
Gouldner, Alvin W., 24, 36, 298, 377,
378, 383, 482

government, autonomy of, 315, 316
government regulation, 314-315, 342

517

gradualism, 48, 281, 295
gradualistic meliorism, 182
Gramsci, Antonio, 6, 21, 113, 450
Grana, Cesar, on bourgeoisie, qt., 64
Grand Social Theory, 99, 104, 151,
153, 420 , ’ ' '

gratification, 241, 248, 267, 269, 276,
278, 279, 280, 281, 3x1, 3x2, 325,
326, 401, 428-430, 435, 467; alloca-
tion of, and morality, 282-283,
284; exchange of, 395; extrinsic vs.
intrinsic, 328; from inheritance,
323-324; marginal utility of, 278,
282, 327, 328, 358; moral and non-
moral, 282, 283; and morality,
238-239; mutuality of, 237, 239,
240, 241, 243, 271-272, 273, 348,
390; and New Left, 401,; and social
stability, 236-239; vs. value system,
324, 325

Great Depression, 138, 141, 142, 144-
145, 146, 147, 148, 169, 170, 171,
173, 174-175, 176, 178, 184, 188,
1 94, I95-I9 6 , 261, 287, 315, 316,
346, 434, 484, 486
gross national product, 278, 284
Guizot, F., 72

Habermas, Jurgen, 5, 6, 113
Haddon, A. C., 127
happening, 394
Hartshorne, E., 174
Harvard University: halo effect, 200-
201; Olympus complex, 173; and
sociology, 22, 143, 145, 147, 149,
159. 172-178, 317
Hauser, Philip M., 10
health, 288

Hemingway, Ernest, 300
Henderson, L. J., 149
hierarchy, 421-422, 435
hippies, 2, 78, 160

historical materialism, 461, 462, 473
historiography, 49, 120, 145
history, and social theory, 15-16
Hobbes, T., 150

Holbach, P. H. T., 66; on man and
society, qt., 72

Homans, George, 139-140, 159, 162,
169, 201, 380, 410, 444, 487; ° n
Pareto, qt., 149; social exchange
theory, 395-396
Hook, Sidney, 185
Horkheimer, Max, 5, 113
Hume, David, 67
Huxley, T., 127

identities, latent, 246-247
ideology, and methodology, 49-51;

Index

5i8

ideology, and methodology ( cont’d . )
and theoretical infrastructure, 47-
49

imperialism, 49, 116, 120, 130, 288,
349, 401, 503, 5io

imputation, of reality, 41-4?, 43-44.
45

income, unearned, 321, 323, 325-326
Indians, American, 76
individualism, 196, 197, 274-277
individuality, and social theory au-
thorship, 46, 47
Industrial Revolution, 283
industrialism, 107-108, 116, 119, 122,
123, 131, 132, 154, 180, 185, 249,
250-251, 288, 331, 332, 349, 436,
455. 456, 457, 458, 466, 477; ano-
mie, 250; marginal utility of grati-
fications, 278; military expendi-
tures, 279; and moral codes,
274-277, 278-281; morality as

private matter, 277; and religion,
274-275

infrastructure, and ideology, 47-49;
of social theories, 46-47, 47-49,
1 14, 244, 309, 3 1 1, 356, 404-405,
406, 412-413, 435-437, 443
inheritance, 1x7-118, 301, 302, 303,
320-326, 328, 330; vs. achievement,
320, 321-323; and allocation of
rewards, 325, 326; and anomie,
324-325; gratification from, 323-

324

input deficit, social, 358, 359
insatiability, of man, 430-432
institutionalization, of sociology, 467-
472, 495

interdependence, doctrine of, 226,
346-347, 421

International Sociological Association,
460

intuition, and social theory, 30
irrelevance, of social theory, 7
Italy, communism in, 452

James, William, 430
Janowitz, Morris, 300
Juares, Jean, 250
Jews, 107, 293

Kahn, Herman, 346

Kant, I., on doctrine of morality, qt.,

Kautsky, Karl, 113, 442
Kennedy Center of Urban Affairs,. 57
Kennedy, John F., 381
Kennedy, Robert F., 58
kinship system, as evolutionary pre-
requisite, 364, 366

Kluckhohn, Clyde, 149
knowledge, 69, 90, 100, 112, 113, 114,
49i, 493-494, 496, 499, 500, 512;
vs. awareness, 492-495
know-nothingism, 5, 41

labor, division of, 122-123, 250
Laing, R. D., on alienation and radi-
■ calism, qt., 8

language, as evolutionary prerequisite,
364, 366, 453; in Marxist theory,
452-454

latent identity, 246-247; of the rich,

297, 300, 301

law and order, 284, 313
Laws, 414

legal system, as evolutionary univer-
sal, 364

legitimacy, 423-425; of elite, 316, 317,
319-320, 322; of middle class, 154-
155, 486-487; political, 48; and
power, 292, 293, 294, 330
legitimation, of functions, as evolu-
tionary universal, 363, 364
Lenin, V. I., 113, 188, 189, 263, 449
"Letter from an Inhabitant of Ge-
neva,” 90

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 450
Levy, Marion J., Jr., 336, 337
liberalism, 59, 400, 500-502
liberative component, of sociology, 13,
14-15, 16, 53, 441, 442, 500
Liebermanism, 455
linguistic categories, and domain
assumptions, 33

Lipset, S. M., 298; on avoidance of
political tensions, qt., 48, 49
Locke, John, 150; on relativism of
morality, qt., 66
Lockwood, David, 378
Loewenstein, Karl, on Max Weber, qt.,
504

lonely crowd, 424
love, in Romanticism, 102-103
Lowenthal, Leo, 113, 381
Lukacs, Georg, 6, 21, 113, 450

Macaulay, T. B., 417
McCarthy era, 449
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 111, 286, 486
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 256
Macrae, Duncan, on prestige of an-
thropologists, qt., 132
Mafia, 390
magic, 44, 129, 131
Maine, Henry, 133
Maistre, Joseph Marie de, 106, 153
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 127, 128, 129,
131, 132, 133, 158, 178, 226, 448;

Index

and magic, 44; on tradition, qt., 132
Malthus, Thomas R., 150
man, insatiable, 430-432; sociologistic
picture of, 206

Mandeville, Bernard de., on evil, qt.,
66

Marcuse, Herbert, 5, 113, 450
marginal utility, of conformity, 232-
233; of gratification, 327, 328, 358
marketability, vs. utility, 74-75
market economy, 407; as evolutionary
universal, 364, 367; and utilitarian-
ism, 64-65, 68-69, 102
market researchers, 439, 445, 501,
502

Marr controversy, 452-455
Marr, N. Y., 453, 454, 455
Marx, Karl, 12, 101, 125, 150, 153, 155
181, 182, 183, 185, 188, 189, 203,
210, 230, 262, 263, 286, 292, 304,
332, 335, 357, 367-368, 426, 429,
436, 441, 447, 450, 473; on Ben-
tham, qt., 109; on bourgeoisie, qt.,
67; critique of utilitarianism, 108-
ni; on social evolution, 363-368;
on utility, qt., 109
Marx-Engels Institute, 185
Marxism, 12, 88-89, 101, 108-111,
126, 128, 129, 156, 167, 228, 22g,
434, 438-439, 441, 442, 444; vs.
Academic Sociology, 20-21, 23, m
113, 157-158, 438-439, 44i, 442;
alienation, 190-191, 193, 263, 335,
400, 401, 405, 451; and capitalism,
179-182, 183, 184, 186; vs. Chris-
tianity, 256-257; and classical so-
ciology, 116, 136-138, 447; concrete
sociology, 158, 461, 462, 473, 474;
convergence toward functionalism,
185-186, 189, 334, 335, 352, 365-
368, 402, 4x0, 436, 443, 450, 454-
455, 472, 473-475, 482; crisis of,
341-342, 450, 451, 452-455; cri-
tique of, 14, 15; domain assump-
tions, 448, 454; equilibrium analy-
sis, 456; and ethics, 457, 472; and
functionalism, 138, 144, 149-151,
447-448, 449, 470-471 ; future-
orientation, 119-120, 470-472;

industrialization and social integra-
tion, 465-467, 470, 471-472; knowl-
edge, xi2; and language, 452-453;
Liebermanism, 455, 458; Marr con-
troversy, 452-455; Marxian for-
mula, xx2; neo-Marxisms, 450-452,
459; and New Left, 6, 7, 9, 400,
401-402, 405-406, 407, 409; vs.
Parsonsianism, 176-177, 179-182,
183, 184, 226-231; proletarian self-
determination, hi— 1X2; and reli-

519

gion, 137, 452; Teligious character,
262-264; as a research able model,
461-462; and Romanticism, 1x6,
448; self-maintaining mechanisms,
456-457; and social stability, 452,
454-458; and the state, 137, 313; in
U S., 7. JSJ-isa; and voluntarism,
185-189; weighting of system parts.
229-231; use-value, 406
Marxism-Leninism, 9, 452, 459, 473
Maugham, Somerset, 238
Mead, George Herbert, 116,396
merchants of morality, 387, 388
Merton, Robert K., 89, 139, 149, 158,
168, 324, 325, 334-335, 402, 426,
448, 474; on sources of anomie, qt.,
68

metaphysics, 53; as world hypotheses,
30-31

methodological dualism, 55, 495-496,
497

methodological empiricism, 444-446,
474.476,477

methodological monism, 497
methodology, 26, 27, 28, 29-30, 45,
49-51. 53. 55-56, 99. 102, 105, 116
Michels, Robert, 298
micro-functionalism, 380
middle class: concept of society, 52;
crisis of, 1 44-1 45; Declaration of
Rights, 70; detachment, 98; English,
J33-I34; and feudal order, 62, 63,
64, 65, 100; legitimacy of, 154-155,
486-487; and New Deal, 151-152;
vs. power elite, 320; power vs. mor-
ality, 1 03-1 04; private property,
108; vs. proletariat, 106; property
rights vs. utilitarianism, 71-72; re-
sistance to Welfare State, 80; sup-
port of sociology, 92, 100, 104-105,
106, 107, 116, 121, 123, 126, 160-
161; Thermidorean reaction, 98,
106; utility and morality, 69, 70, 71,
100, 381-383, 384, 386, 389, 390;
utility vs. profit, 109, no; utility
standard, 62-65, *33: virtues of,
382; and Welfare State, 161; and
World War I, 144; see also utili-
tarian culture
military expenditures, 279
military training, and reflexive obedi-
ence, 13

Mills, C. Wright, 12, 15, 313, 314,
319,320,351,378
money, 69; vs. power, 291, 292
Moore, Wilbert E., 89, 168, 369, 421,
456; on Marxism, qt., 368
moral, and non-moral gratification,
282-283

moral code, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184,

520

moral code ( cont'd )

190-191, 192-193, 194-195. 212,
217-218, 230, 234-236, 237-239,
240, 241, 242-243, 244, 246-247,
248, 274, 390, 485-486, 487; au-
tonomy of, 326-327, 328; com-
munality of, 192-193; as divinely
ordained, 274; and functional au-
tonomy, 217-218; and industrial-
ism, 274-277, 278-281; legitimacy
of, 273-274, 275-276; and gratifica-
tion, 327-328, 329; nonpartisan-
ship of, 273-274, 275
moral conformity, and prestige, 328-
33i

moralistics, 247, 248, 289-290
morality, 100, 112, 132, 254-257, 264,
343; and allocation of gratifications,
282-283, 284; in functional soci-
ology, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143; and
mutuality of gratification, 271-272,
273, 390; Noble Lie, 272; poverty
of, 118, 121-122, 123, 124,326,343;
and power, 84-85, 103-104, 192,
205, 255, 292, 293, 294, 296, 297,
358-359, 485-486, 487-488; as pri-
vate matter, 277; vs. productivity,
431; and Romanticism, 138-139; as
rules of the game, 381, 382, 383,
392; sanctions, 273; and scarcity,
278-281; social function of, 271;
and social order, 248-251, 251-254;
and social stability, 275-276, 324;
as socially disruptive, 272-273;
source of, 267-272; and technology,
282-283; and utility, 66-67, 69-70,
7i, 387-388, 389, 390, 405-407
morals, sociology of, 192
multiple causation, of social change,
227, 228-229
Murray, Gilbert, 506
Murray, Henry, 149
mutuality, and social stability, 237,
271-272, 348, 390

Nanterre, France, student rebellion,
5> 9

N + 1 conception of sociology, 92-93,
161-162

natural rights, 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 139,
384, 406

Nazi Germany, 500
Negro, domain assumptions concern-
ing, 32, 37. 38

neo-Marxisms, 450-452, 459
neo-Parsonsianism, 160
New Deal, 141, 142, 151, 152, 153,
174,343

New Left, 3, 5, 7, i°» 78, 160, 394,
398, 443, 444; ambivalence toward

Index

theory, 5; and Blacks, 399, 40 o,
408; characteristics, 399-400; do-
main assumptions, 388, 401 ; and
Marxism, 6, 7, 9, 400, 401—402,
405-406, 407, 409; meaningless-
ness of success, 407; sentiments,
408; and sociology, 11-12, 400-
402, 405-410; theoretical infra-
structure, 404-405, 406; and the
university, 402-410; and utilitarian-
ism, 406, 408-409
New Left Review, 158
Nicolaus, Martin, on sociology and the
DHEW, qt., 10, 11

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 66, 79,
138,391

Nisbet, Robert, 257
nonrationality, 205-206
normative assumptions, 32, 38

obedience, reflexive, and military
training, 13

objectivity, 54, 60, 102, 103, 104, 176,
386, 439-440, 497, 498, 499, 51 1
Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing
Alternative, 406
OECO, 349

Oedipal complex, 38, 128
oligarchy, 216, 298-299
oneness, of social world, 199, 204, 207,
208-209, 210, 211, 215, 238, 419-
420

operational analysis, 459
operations research, 346, 445, 474
optimism, 432-434
Osgood, Charles E., 33, 84, 482
ownership, 307-308, 309, 311, 312

Pareto, Vilfredo, 89, 143, 149, 150,
179,263,286,447

Parsons, Talcott, 6, 14, 17, 26, 42, 48-
49, 50, 51, 61, 84, 89, 113, 114, 116,
138-162, 390, 391, 392, 394, 395,
396, 420, 422, 428, 430, 43i, 432,
433, 434, 442, 445, 447, 449, 45°,
451, 453, 456, 466; biography of,
147-148; literary style, 199-205;
students of, 201, 202-203, 374-376;
taxonomic zeal, 205, 206-207
Parsonsian functionalism: achieve-
ment vs. inheritance, 320, 321-323;
alienation, 192-193; anomic dis-
order, 224—225; antideterminism,
190-191, 192, 194, 195. 2I 3, 214;
ascribed vs. achieved rewards, 320,
322-323; authority, 243, 261, 294,
487; autonomy of government, 315,
316; Blacks, 289; capitalism, 178-
182, 304, 434; capitalism, perfect-
ability of, 182-185; categorical ex-

Index

haustiveness, 208-2 og; Christianity
vs. Marxism, 256-257; Christianity
and social progress, 255-257; com-
plementarity, 240, 241-242, 243:
complementarity, and social system,
304, 300, 310; concept formation,
206-207, 208; confiictnal valida-
tion, 221, 222; conformity, 234-236,
237-239- 327-328, 329, 352: con-
sensual validation, 221, 222; as con-
servative response, 495-197; con-
vergence toward Marxism, 1S5-
xS6~, 189. 354-357, 360, 361, 365-
36S; cultural vs. social systems,
224-225; detachment, 172, 175,
ig5; determinism, 1S1— 182, 183,
190-191, 194, 195, -213-214; devi-
ance, 237, 238. 286; disequilibrium,
233, 234; domain assumptions, 207,

241, 352, 353, 355= dynamic analy-
sis, 204; education, 28S, 289; Ego-
Alter formulation, 212-213, 220,
231-233, 236. 237, 239, 240, 241,

242, 247, 262-272, 305, 30S, 307;
equality of opportunity, 2SS, 303,
320; evolutionary prerequisites,
364-36S; evolutionary universals,
362, 363, 365, 366, 367, 4S5; evolu-
tionism, 357, 361, 362-36S; ex-
ploitation, 1S1, 230-240, 242, 304;
extrinsic vs. intrinsic gratification,
328; family system, 303, 304, 31 1,
312; force, 286, 290, 292, 293, 294,
295, 310; franchise, 297-298, 300;
functional autonomy, 215-216, 223,
225, 226, 227; government regula-
tion, 314-315, 342; gratification,
236-239. 240, 241, 243, 282, 323-
324, 327, 328; and Great Depres-
sion, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174-175,
176, 178, 184, 18S, 194, 195-196,
261, 2S7, 315, 316, 346, 434; Har-
vard University, 172-178, 200-201 ;
health, 2SS; human vs. social sys-
tems, 218-224; importance of, 167-
169; individualism, 196, 197; indus-
trialism, 180, 185, 249, 250-251,
272-277, 278-281; infrastructure,
244, 309, 31 1 ; inheritance, 301, 302,
3°3, 320-326, 328, 330; input-defi-
cit, social, 358, 359; latent identi-
ties, 246-247. 297, 300, 301; legiti-
macy, 292, 293, 294, 316, 317, 310-
320, 322, 330; marginal utility, of
conformity, 232—233; vs. Marxian
system model, 226-231; vs. Marx-
ism, 176-177, 179-182, 183, 184,
213, 228, 229; middle class virtues,
382; money, vs. power, 291, 292;
moral codes, 1S1, 182, 183, 184,

5^1

I 8°—I9t, 19a, 194-193, 212, 230,
238-239, 240, 241, 242-243, 244,
246—247, 248, 483— 4S6, 4S7: moral
codes, autonomy of, 326-327, 328;
moral codes, communality of, 192-
193; moral codes, and functional au-
tonomy, 217-218: moralistics, 24 7-
248, 289-290; morality, and power,
255; morality, and social stability,
324: multiple causation, of social
change, 227, 228-229; mutaiity,
237, 271-272, 34S; New Deal, 174,
343; nonrationalitT, of behavior,
205-206; objectivity, 176; oligarchy,
216, 298—299; oneness of the social
world, 190, 204, 207, 20S-209, 210,
211, 215, 238; openness of theory,
177; ownership, 307-30S, 309, 311,
312; Pareto circle, 149-150; vs. pes-
simistic view of capitalism, 1S0,
181, 1S2, 1S3, 195; piety of, 259-
262, 290; power, 286, 287, 2S8, 290-
297, 299, 300, 304, 310, 311, 312,
320, 328, 329, 330; power elite,
313-320, 322, 359, 360; prestige,
and moral conformity, 328-331;
private property, 301, 302, 303, 304-
313, 323-32-?, 325, 326; produc-
tivity, 287, 28S, 348; proletariat,
181 ; rationality, of capitalism and
socialism, 180-182; reciprocity,
240-241, 242, 243, 273, 309, 310:
religion, 248, 433; rewards, vs.
value system, 324, 325; role playing,
223, 433; role-theory, and property,
305-310; Romanticism, 100; sci-
ence, 364; self-approval, and moral
conformity, 32S-329, 330; self-
esteem, vs. self-regard, 221; self,
maintenance of, 221—222; self, as
system, 22; sex, 247, 431 ; similar-
ity to Comte, 205-205; single-factor
model, of social change, 227-22S;
and social change, 194, 196, 107;
social change: conflict, 354-357;
social change; differentiation, 357—
361; social change: theory of, 35 x—
354; social engineering, 17S; social
mobility, 2S0; social order, 195, 24S;
social ori gins , 1 69; social stability,
303; social stratification, 244, 2S7—
290, 304, 326—331; social system,
vs. property rights, 309, 31°, 3 JI »
312; socialization, primary vs.
secondary, 21S-220; and sociologi-
cal Positivism, 199 - spiritual vs. ma-
terial values, 329-331; ^ state ’
and property, 3°/, S 05 - 3°9> 3i°>
311, 312-3x3; stratified system
model, 230-231; system analysis.

522

Parsonsian functionalism : ( cont'd )
210-213; system change, 211, 226,
227; system equilibrium, 210, 211,
214-215, 216, 231-232, 233, 235,
236, 241, 242-244, 456-457; sys-
tem interdependence, 210-211,
213-215, 216, 222, 226, 232; sys-
tem maintenance, 210, 231-232,
236, 237, 238, 239, 242, 247, 310;
technology, 364; unearned income,
321, 323, 325-326; universalism,
298, 301, 302, 303, 321; university
setting, 169-172; vested interests,
354, 355, 356, 360, 361; violence,
293; voluntarism, 185-189, 189-
195, 206, 290, 348, 396; wealth,
288, 300-302, 303, 3ii, 328, 329,
330; weighting of system parts,
226-231; and Welfare State, 317,
342, 343, 348, 35i; see also func-
tionalism, Platonism
people, as a commodity, 383; as ex-
perimental subjects, 50, 51 ; instru-
mental use of, 276-277, 280, 492;
useless, 73, 76-78
Pepper, Stephen C., 30
permitted, vs. unpermitted social
worlds, 484-488, 512
Pettigrew, Thomas, on Black progress
in U.S., qt., 49

phenomenology, 390
Piaget, Jean, 423

Plato, 94, 111, 153- I 99, 238, 290,
303

Platonism, and functionalism: ano-
mie, 425-428; authenticity, 423-
425; conformity, 424-425, 428-430,
435; death, 432-434; deviance, 425-
428, 429; domain assumptions, 413,
415, 421, 435; economy of scarcity,
43°. 431 ; elites vs. masses, 421,
430, 436; equality, 421-422, 435;
Eternal Form vs. universal requi-
sites, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 433;
evil vs. dysfunction, 417-418, 422;
function, vs. dysfunction, 414-415;
good vs. evil, 418-419; gratification,
428-430, 435; hierarchy, 421-422.
435; infrastructure, 412-413, 435-
437; insatiable man, 430-432; legiti-
macy, 423-425; morality, vs. pro-
ductivity, 431; oneness of social
world, 419-420; optimism vs. pes-
simism, 432-434; role playing, 426-
427, 431 ; science and technology,
430; sentiments, 413-419, 435;
slavery, 415-416; social control,
421, 436; social order, 422-423, 429,
435; social stability, 416-417, 421;
socialization, 421, 422, 429, 431,

Index

433; teleology, 414; values, 421, 423,
424, 428, 430, 435

poets, 75.99.102
poison gas, 13

Poland, sociology in, 459, 463
Polanyi, Michael, 29
police state, 283, 284
Polish Sociological Bulletin, 459
political activism, 438
political loyalty, 72, 73
political stability, and social chance
48

Politics of Experience, 8
polycentrism, of sociology, 159, 444
Positivism, 187, 191, 192, 249, 251,

252, 254, 259, 260, 332, 342, 344,
354, 436, 486, 491, 495; and Aca-
demic Sociology, 102; and idea of
continuity, 17, 18

postulations, in social theory, 29, 31
Poulantzas, Nicos, 450
poverty, 4, 8, 146, 161, 196, 401 ; of
morality, 118, 121-122, 123, 124,
343, 426; sociology of, 351
power: control of, 242-244; differ-
ential, and system equilibrium, 242-
244, 379, 381; of middle class, 320;
vs. moral conformity, 328, 329, 330;
vs. morality, 84-85, 103-104, 154,
192, 205, 255, 292, 293, 294, 296,
297, 358-359, 484-486, 487-488;
and property, 310, 311, 312; of the
rich, 297, 300, 304

power elite, 313-320, 322, 359, 360
Power Elite, 313
prejudice, 4,32,33,41
prestige, and moral conformity,
328-331
price, 69

privacy, 75-76, 77

"Problem of Controlled Institutional

Change,” 355

productivity, 287, 288, 348, 366-367
profits, 109, no, 287, 288
professional roles, technical vs. social,

professionalism, 154-157,4^6
professionalization, of sociology, 16-

17, 18, 36, 48, 54, 86, 137
program budgeting, 458
proletariat, 106, m-112, 181
property private, 71-72, 90, 91, 250,

253, 301, 302, 303, 304-313, 323-
324, 325; and gratification, 326;
and power, 310, 311, 3 12 ', and the
state, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312-
313

Protestant Ethic, 121, 156, 180, 181,
255

Index

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, 178, 179
Protestantism, 255

Psychedelic Culture, 78-80, 160, 162,
285, 386, 442, 444

racial conflict, 18, 48, 49, 142, 146
racial prejudice, 33

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 114, 117, 128,
129, 226, 346; and magic, 44
radical caucus, of ASA, 10-11, 378,
438

radical sociology, 437-443. 489, 5 ° 3 -
505

radicalization, of sociology, 437-443
radicals, young: ambivalence toward
theory, 5-6; anti-intellectualism of,
4-5; attitude toward sociologists,
8-g; attraction of sociology for, ro-
il; characteristics of, 399-400; and
domain assumptions, 38-39; Fied-
ler's characterization of, 9, ro; and
Goffman, 379; irrelevance of theory,
3, 7, 8; and paperback sociology, 4;
and rote Marxism, 6, 7, 9; senti-
ments, vs. theory, 7-8
reality: collective definitions of, 45;
imputations of, 41-42, 43-44. 45;
personal, 40, 42, 43. 44. 45. 47. 54.
55 . 56, 58, 59, 148; role, 41, 42,
43, 44; sociologists' conception of,
41-42

reciprocity, 240—241, 242, 243, 273,
309,310

Reflexive Sociology, 488-500; admin-
istrative sociology, 501 ; awareness,
494. 496, 497, 498. 499. 5°2, 507;
death, 509; knowledge vs. aware-
ness, 492-495; and liberalism, 500-
502; man and history, 509—510;
man vs. society, 507-510; methodo-
logical dualism, 495-49 6 , 497;

methodological monism, 497; ob-
jectivity, 497, 498, 499, firi; as
radical, 489, 503-505; religion, 510;
and science, 500; sexual revolution,
499; and university, 502; value free,
499; and Welfare State, 501-502,
5x1; work ethic, 504-507
relativism, 66, 90, 146-147
relevance, 40-41, 168
religion, 53, 62, 95, 132, 134-135,
248, 391, 433. 486, 500, 5x0; as
evolutionary prerequisite, 364, 365,
366; and human suffering, 264; and
industrialism, 274-275; and Marx-
ism, 137. 452.- sociology of, 134,
140; and the state

religion of humanity, 24, 25, 97, 98,

5 2 3

99, 100, xoi, 102, 104, 134, 135,
254,260, 261,275

repressive component, of sociology,
12,53,441,500

research, and personal realities, 44;
theoretical structuring of, 42-43;
see also methodology
Restoration era, 94-102, 103, 161
rewards, ascribed, vs. achieved, 320,
322-323; irrationality, 389; vs.
value system, 324, 325; see also
gratification
Richards, Audrey, 414
Riecken, Henry, 474
role playing, 223, 426-427, 431, 433
role realities, of sociologist, 41, 42, 43,
44

role-theory, and property, 305-310
Romanticism, 78, 79, 98, 99, 100, 101,
102-103, 115-116, 121, 138-

139. 140, 190, 393, 492; and ma-
terialism, 184; Marxian, 116, 448
Roosevelt, F. D., 151-152
Rousseau, J. J., 76, 184, 210, 388; on
appearances, qt., 386, 387; and so-
cial contract, 51

Rules of Sociological Method, 182
Ruskin, John, 213

Sade, Marquis de, 275
Saint-Simon, Henri, 24, 88, 91, 92,

99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107, in,

112, 113, 114, 120, 123, 134.

136, 153, 191, 222, 332; parable of
sudden death, 89, 126; and social-
ism, 90-91 ; on utility, qt., 89-90

scarcity, economics of, 430, 431
Schaff, Adam, 451
Schuetz, Alfred, 390
science, 184, 249, 255, 257, 265-266,
274, 277, 430. 492, 500; and democ-
racy, 69; and functionalism, 154-
155. i5 6 . 364; high, 1 16; and legiti-
macy of morality, 275; and socio-
logical positivism, 91, 95, 97. 99.

100, 101, 102, 106, 112, 113. 114;
in utilitarian culture, 69, go

scientific method (see methodology)
scientific socialism, 406
scientism, 53, 100, 275
sector autonomy, 468—469
self, as a commodity, 383; mainte-
nance of, 221-222; as system, 222
self-approval, and moral conformity,
328-329, 330

self-esteem, vs. self-image, 221
Selznick, Philip, 298
sentimentality, 387, 388
sentiments, 113, 148, 180, 181, 205,
227, 288, 401, 404, 406, 408, 413,

sentiments ( coni'd )

41 9. 435: consensus! validation of.
8: defined, 37; and domain assump-
tions. 37-40, 401, 404; relevance to
social thcorv. 39-40, 46; vs. thcorv,
7-8

sex, 247, 39 1 . 43 i. 499
shadow group, 46-47
Shils, E. A., 114, 125. 254, 260, 261,
421

Sieves, Abbe, 62, 89; on aristocracy,
qt.,63

Simmel, Georg, 93
Simon Fraser University, 10
singlc-f actor mode], 227-228
Skinner, B. F., 140, 396
slavery', 415, 416

Smelser, Neil, 305; on government
and social change, qt., 347, 348;
on social change theory, qt., 368-
369

social, vs. human systems, 2x8-224
social accounting, 49-50
social change, ig4, 1 96, 197; and
alienation, 40; democratic, 298; dif-
ferentiation, 357-361; theory of,
351-353, 353-354, 368-370
social contract, 50-51, 52
social control, 421, 436
social Darwinism, 133
social engineering, 152-153, 178
social input-deficit, 358, 359
social isolation, 172
social mission, of sociology, 26-27
social mobility, 289, 461
social order, 145-157, 195, 248, 252-
253, 281, 283, 331, 335, 336, 422-
423, 429, 435; maintenance of, 254
social origins; of Parsonsianism, 169;
of sociological Positivists, 103, 106-
107

social problems, 92, 177, 345-357
social reality, and tacit understand-
ings, 390-395

social sciences: cognitive validity, vs.
social values, 12-13; funding of,
345; objectivity of, 54, 60; and
utilitarian culture, 492-493
social solidarity, moral and nonmoral
gratifications, 282, 283
social space, 309

social stability: and capitalism, 304 ;
and gratification, 303; and morality,
324; and social change, 416-417,
421

social stratification, 244, 253, 30 4,
379, 40X; as evolutionary universal,
363, 364; and moral code, 326-331;
in Soviet Union, 459, 460-461;
theory of, 287-290

social structure, and alienation. 51-v.
Social Sy fieri. 139, 353. 33.;. 337, 335
social theory. 25. 14S: Amcriranired
Hegelianism. 17; authorship, and
the shadow group. 46-47; back-
ground assumptions 16. 20-35;
consensual validation. 30, 45; con-
sensus, 17, 18; convergence and
continuity, 18; and counter-culture.
5, 285; and cultural obsolescence.
8; culture and society as autonev
mous, 52, 53, 54; domain assump-
tions, 31, 32. 33. 34- 35- 36-37.
37-40. 4i, 46, 47-48. 51-54. 401,
404; dramaturgical. 37S-390, 400;
ethnomethodology, 7, 390-395; and
facts, 42-43, 483-484, 491; and
Frankfurt school of critical sociol-
ogy. 5-6, 12, 1 13, 409. 450; histori-
cal approach to, *5-16; individual-
ity of, 46, 47; infrastructure of. 46-
49, 396-398, 404-405; intuitively
convincing, 30: irrelevance of, 7;
knowledge, 491, 493-494. 4g6, 499.
500; knowledge, vs. awareness.
492-495; and local environment,
47; nature of crisis of, 34; and pa-
perback sociology, 4; permitted vs.
unpermitted social worlds, 484-
488, 512; postulations. 29, 31;
power, vs. goodness, 485-486, 487-
488; Reflexive Sociology, 488-500;
relevance, 40-41 ; research method-
ology, 49-51, 53; role of profession-
als, 13; and science, 492; and senti-
ments, 7-8, 39-40, 46, 47, 401, 404,
406; social exchange, 395-396; in
structural functionalism, 152-153;
structuring of research, 42-43; sub-
theoreticaJ level, 43, 45, 46, 47; sys-
tematic sampling, 45; and theorist's
personal reality, 8-9, 396-398,
481-484; university setting, 402-
404; utilitarianism, 82-86; value-
free, 485, 486, 487, 488, 491 ; and
young radicals, 3, 5-6, 8
socialism, 250, 484; and Christianity,
256-257; future-orientation of,
119-120; rationality of, 180-182;
scientific, 406; vs. utilitarianism,
1 08-1 11; and utility, 90-91 ; uto-
pian, gi, 406

socialization, 421, 422, 429, 43 3 > 433;

primary vs. secondary, 218-220
society, concept of, 52, 53, 54; a $ so "
cial system, 142, 143
Sociological Positivism, 88, in, 278,
342; anomie, 102-103; art, 102;
artists, 99; and Catholic Church,
95, 96-97, 98, 99, 107; Comtian

5 2 6

Socrates, 354, 414, 426-427, 431
solidarity, mechanical vs. organic,
119-120, 122, 196

Sombart, Werner, 150, 178, 179, 180,
181, 182, 183, 185, 188, 189, 263,
434; on economic vs. love interests,

qt., 103

“Some Considerations on the Theory
of Social Change,” 357
Sorokin, P. A., 173, 174-175, 177
Southey, R., on Christianity, qt., 79
Soviet Communist Party, 20th Con-
gress, 452, 454, 455. 463
Soviet Revolution, 144, 179
Soviet Sociological Association, 473
Soviet Union, 18, 48, 151, 157, 158,
279. 298, 299, 316, 367, 454; de-
mocracy in, 457; industrialization,
466, 477; Liebermanism, 458;

Marxism in, 450-452; objectivity,
in social science, 470, 472; sector
autonomy, 468-469; social mobil-
ity, 461; social stratification, 460-
461, 495; sociology in, 9, 21-22, 23,
447-448, 455, 459-475; and U.S.,
473, 485; value-free sociology, 470;
and Welfare State, 284
Sozialisticher Deutscher Studentbund,
5

Spencer, Herbert, 117, 128, 140, 357
spiritual values, 253, 276, 329-331,
43i

Sprehe, J. T., 24, 36, 168, 247, 377
Stael, Madame de, 99, 100, 103; on
belief, qt., 97

Stalin, J. V., 452-453, 460; on theory
of sudden change, qt., 454
Stalinism, 6, 21, 22, 138, 158, 178,
263, 280, 448, 452, 457. 463. 464
state, the, 106, 280, 283; and func-
tional anthropology, 342-343; and
individual well-being, 72-73; non-
partisanship of, 274; and private
property, 307, 308, 309, 310, 31 1,
3 1 2-3 13; sociological views of,
342-343

stereotypes, and background assump-
tions, 32, 33

stratified system model, 230-231
Strauss, David, 134

structural functionalism (see func-
tionalism)

Structure of Social Action, 17, 146,
150, 179, 181, 185, 186, 188, 196,
213, 286, 288, 356, 370
student rebellion, 18; and sociologists,
9-10, 12

subjects, experimental, vs. people, 50,
5i

Index

subtheoretical level, as infrastructure,
46,47

suicide, 93, 122
sunshine sociologists, 501
Sweden, social sciences in, 345
syndicalist corporations, 1 18, 343
system: analysis, 210-213, 474;

change, 211, 226, 227; equilibrium’
210, 2ix, 214-215, 216, 231-232,
233. 235, 236, 241, 242-244, 456-
457; interdependence, 210-21 1,
213-215, 216, 222, 226, 231; main-
tenance, 210, 231-232, 236, 237,
238, 239, 242, 247, 3x0
systems theory, general, 445
systematic sampling, 45

taxes, 313

technology, 69, 90, 92, 99, 112, 184,
249, 255, 277, 278, 282, 284, 364,
430; as evolutionary prerequisite,
364-365, 366, 367; and traditional
morality, 282-283
teleology, 414

Thermidorean reaction, 98, 106
Thierry, Augustin, 120
Third Force, 158
Third World, 349, 456
Tilly, Charles, on social accounting,
qt., 49-50

Timasheff, N., 174, 177
Tocqueville, Alexis de, on democracy
and science, qt., 69
Tomkins, Sylvan, 265, 266
“Toward a General Theory of Social
Change,” 368
tribalism, 119, 120
Troeltsch, Ernst, 115
Trotsky, Leon, 113
Tucker, Robert, 262, 263
Tumin, Melvin, 421, 456

unearned income, 321, 323, 325-326
UNESCO, 349
, united front, 18

United States: Academic Sociology
in, 22-23, 26-27; Black progress in,
4g; as capitalistic, 184; as flourish-
ing society, 49; government support
of social sciences, 345; in 1930’s,
vs. Restoration France, 151-152;
open class system, 325; social
stratification, 287-290; and Soviet
Union, 473i 485

universal requisite, 414, 4i5> 41®,
417, 418, 433 .

universalism, 64, 298, 301, 302, 303,

321 _
university, and Parsonsianism, 169—

. 172; vs. institute, 47®— 477; ant ^ s0 *

Index

ciology, 14, 1 16. 135-136. 440 - 441 .
495. 504. Si 2 : and the state,
136. 137

University of California, Berkeley,
and sociology, 22, 172
University of Chicago, and sociology.

21, 22, 116, 145, 157, 159, 444, 445
urban community. 93
utilitarian culture, 61; anomie. 67.
70; art, 75, 91 ; artists, 75, 80; cal-
culation of consequences. 65, 66,
67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 409; charity, 72;
and Christianity, 62, 65-66, 67. 69-
70, 79; clergy, 75; cognitive judg-
ment, 65, 66, 67, 84; detachment,
102; division of labor, 122-123;
gainful employment, 74-75; goals.
68-69; and Grand Social Theory,
82-S6; human usefulness, 73-74.
77-78; knowledge, 69, 90; market
economy, 64-65, 6S-6g, 102, mar-
ketability, vs. utility, 74-75; mar-
keting, 383-384; middle-range so-
cial theory, 86; money, 69; and
morality, 66-67, 69-70, 71 ; moral-
ity, vs. power, 84-85; natural
rights, 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 3S6, 406;
poets, 75; political loyalty, 72, 73,
price, 69; privacy, 75-76, 77, prop-
erty rights, 71-72; vs. Psychedelic
Culture, 78-80; and relativism, 66,
90; and Romanticism. 78, 79, sci-
ence, 69. 90. 274, 277, 492-493.
and sociological Positivism, 92, the
state, and individual well-being.
72-73; technology. 69, go. 92. uni-
versalism, 64; useless people. 73,
76-78; utility, as moral value, 70.
71; utility, as standard, 62-65, 68.
69, 73; and Welfare State, 76-7S,
80-S2

Utilitarianism, 61, 106, 192; anomic,
276; Benthamite, 10S, 109, no;
and English aristocracy, 125-126;
and German sociology, 121; Marx'
critique of, ioS-in; vs. natural
rights, in; and New Left. 406.
40S-409; popular, 124. social, 110.
121, 123, 124. 13S. 139-140. 3=o.
333, 388; and socialism. 10S-111
utility, in functionalism. 120-1 21.
139. 4S7; vs. marketability, 74-75-.
and middle class, 133. 134; and
morality, 66-67, 69-70. 71. 3S7-
3S8, 389. 390. 405, 406, 407; of peo-
ple. 73-74, 77-7S; and reward, 40S;
social, vs. individual, S9-91, 92;
and socialism, 90-91 ; as standard.
62-65, 68, 69, 73. 10S, 109. in

utopian socialism, pt. tyj. io5-toa,
13S, 406

value-free sociology. 36-37. 107. to;.
105. 135. 137. 106. 333-337. 470.
483. 4S6. 4S7. 4S8. 4S9. 40*. 400
values, as imprintnblcs. 411, 413. 474.
428. 430. 435 ; spiritual. 233. 276.
329-331. 43t

variables, in sociology, 56-57
Vcblen. T.. 325. 355
vested interests. 354. 355, 33O, 360,
381

Viet Report, to
Vietnam war, 4S, 309. 503
violence. 286. 293. 4S7
Voice of America. 48
voluntarism. 13S. 130, 140. 141. 143.
156, 185-189. 189-195. 206, 290.
348.396

voting rights, in U.S., 40
VuIgaT Idealism. 326. 327
Vulgar Marxism, 326. 317, 402, 441.
474

Wallace. Anthony, 20
war. 49, 146. 2S1. 286. 292. 4S7
Washington, George, 48-49
wealth, 311. 313, 381, vs moral con-
formity. 32S, 329. 330, and status,
300-302, 303

Weber, Max, 89. 116, 117. no, 121,
122. 123. 137. 140. 148, 150, 153,
155 . 157 . 178. '79. 180. i8j. 183.
185, 188, 189. 255. 263. 264. 3S7,
3SS, 434, 443, 447 . 5°-t; and bu-
reaucracy, 40, 44
welfare, 276. 277

Welfare State, 73, SG. 90, 134, 142,
143, 145. 153. 158. 184, 282. 299.
317. 3=o, 333 . 342. 343- 3-8. 35t.
40S, 410. 501-502, 51 1. and Chris-
tianity, 255-256, disposal of useless
people, 76-78, 8 1 -82. effectiveness
of programs. 80-Si. and functional
sociology, 160-162. 333. 342-344.
344-351. 369-370, 410. 445, 449.
458, vs. police state, 284; vs. re-
sistance of middle class. 80; ar.d so-
ciology, 22-23, 260-262. 439. 443
Welfare-Warfare State, 500. 50S
well-being, and the state, 72-73
Western sociology, 8S-S9, 116, 157,
459; classical. 89; crisis of. 341-
342. 410, division into academic
and Marxist camps, 111-113. 447.
449; Marxism. 88-89. polycen-
trism. 15S-159; sociological Posi-
tivism, 88, 89-108

5zS

What Is the Third Estate ?, 62
What Is to Be Done?, 1 88
White, Harrison, 460
Whitehead, Alfred North, 413
Wiese, Leopold von, 93
Wildavsky, Aaron, 458
will, 190, igi, 192. 205
Williams, Robin, 89, 173
Wilson, Edmund, 256
work ethic, 504-507

Index

world hypotheses, and background as-
sumptions, 30-31, 33
World War I, and middle class, 144
Wrong, Dennis, 378

Yugoslavia, Marxism in, 451 ; sociol-
ogy in, 459 . 463. 465

Zeitlin, Irving M., 136
Zimmerman, C., 174

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